I/O Clients Test Bed; Table 3. Hardware Configuration For Dfc; Table 4. Software And Firmware Configuration For Dfc - Dell PowerEdge EL Manual

Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS
NFS SERVER
CACHE POOL
SSD CONTROLLER
Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 1
Table 4.
CACHING SOFTWARE
Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 2
PCIe SSD DRIVER
Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 2
In DFC vocabulary, the cache or cache pool is the SSDs, and the disk that is enabled for caching is the
virtual disk on the PowerVault MD1200s. Most importantly, the methods used to access the data remain
the same as in the baseline case. The I/O clients simply mount the same NFS exported directory as in
the baseline configuration. Detailed instructions on configuring DFC for this storage solution are
provided in Appendix A: Step-by-step configuration of Dell Fluid Cache for NFS.

2.3. I/O clients test bed

The pure NFS baseline solution and the NFS+DFC solution were exercised using a 64-node HPC cluster.
This compute cluster was used to provide I/O load to the storage solution and help benchmark the
capabilities of the solution.
Using the latest quarter height Dell PowerEdge M420 blade server
cluster, the 64-client cluster was configured in 20U of rack space. Details of the 64-client test bed are
provided in Table 5. Figure 3 shows the entire test bed including the clients. Note that all I/O traffic to
the NFS server used the InfiniBand network and the IPoIB protocol.
Table 3. Hardware configuration for DFC
Server configuration
PowerEdge R720
Two 350GB Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD
Internal (slot 4)
Storage configuration
Same as baseline, as described in Table 1
Software and firmware configuration for DFC
Software
Dell Fluid Cache for DAS v1.0
Firmware and Drivers
mtip32xx 1.3.7-1 latest available at the time of this study.
Recommend using mtip32xx v2.1.0
5
as the building block for the I/O
10