Hi All,

I have a two-site replicate GPFS cluster running GPFS v3.5.0-26. We have 
recently run into a performane problem while exporting an SMB mount to one of 
our client labs.


Specifically, this lab is attempting to run a MatLab SPM job in the SMB share 
and seeing sharply degraded performance versus running it over NFS to their own 
NFS service. The job does time-slice correction on MRI image volumes that 
result in roughly 15,000 file creates, plus at lease one read and at least one 
write to each file. Here is a list that briefly describes the 
time-to-completion for this job, as run under various conditions:


1) Backed by their local fileserver, running over NFS - 5 min

2) Backed by our GPFS, running over SMB - 30 min

3) Backed by our GPFS, running over NFS - 20 min

4) Backed by local disk on our exporting protocol node, over SMB - 6 min

5) Backed by local disk on our exporting protocol node, over NFS - 6 min

6) Back by GPFS, running over GPFS native client on our supercomputer - 2 min


>From this list, it seems that the performance problems arise when combining 
>either SMB or NFS with the GPFS backend. It is our conclusion that neither SMB 
>nor NFS per se create the problem, exporting a local disk share over either of 
>these protocols yields decent performance.


Do you have any insight as to why the combination of the GPFS back-end with 
either NFS or SMB yields such anemic performance? Can you offer any tuning 
recommendations that may improve the performance when running over SMB to the 
GPFS back-end (our preferred method of deployment)?


Thank you so much for your help as always!


Stewart Howard

Indiana University

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