Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 17:49:39 +0100 From: Michael Aronsen <michael.aronsen@gmail.com> To: Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HPC and zfs. Message-ID: <AB8B3E3A-1161-4855-B418-B37E16D0EC52@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20120206162206.GA541@icarus.home.lan> References: <4F2FF72B.6000509@pean.org> <20120206162206.GA541@icarus.home.lan>
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Hi, On Feb 6, 2012, at 17:22 , Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > - What single motherboard supports up to 192GB of RAM Get an HP DL580/585 - they support 2TB/1TB RAM. > - How you plan on getting roughly 410 hard disks (or 422 assuming > an additional 12 SSDs) hooked up to a single machine Use LSI SAS92XX 4 (x4) port external controllers, and SuperMicro = SC847E26-RJBOD1 disk shelves. Each disk shelf needs 2 ports on the LSI controller, which means you get = 90 disks per LSI card. The DL580/585's have 11 PCIe slots, so you'd end up with 990 disks per = server using this setup. >=20 > If you are considering investing the time and especially money (the = cost > here is almost unfathomable, IMO) into this, I strongly recommend you > consider an actual hardware filer (e.g. NetApp). Your performance and > reliability will be much greater, plus you will get overall better > support from NetApp in the case something goes wrong. In the case you > run into problems with FreeBSD (and I can assure you in this kind of > setup you will) with this kind of extensive setup, you will be at the > mercy of developers' time/schedules with absolutely no guarantee that > your problem will be solved. You definitely want a support contract. > Thus, go NetApp. We have NetApp's at our University for home storage, but I would = struggle to recommend them for HPC storage. A dedicated HPC filesystem such as Lustre or FhGFS = (http://www.fhgfs.com/cms/) will almost certainly give you better = performance as they're purpose made. We use FhGFS in a rather small setup (44 TB usable space and ~200 HPC = nodes), but they do have installations with 700TB+. The setup consists of 2 metadata nodes and 4 storage nodes, all = supermicro servers with 24 WD Velociraptor 600 GB 10K RPM disks. This setup gives us 4.8GB/sec write and 4.3GB/sec read speeds, all for a = lot less than a comparable NetApp solution (we paid around =8030.000). It now has support for mirroring on a per folder level for resilience. Currently it only runs on Linux but i'm considering a FreeBSD port to = get ZFS for volume management and now that OFED is in FreeBSD 9, = Infinifband is possible. I'd highly recommend a parallel filesystem, unfortunately not many, if = any, are available on FreeBSD at this time. Regards, Michael
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