On Jun 21, 2007  19:00 +0200, Andrei Maslennikov wrote:
> We are in the process of testing of a would-be low cost Lustre head
> (a black box disk server with an  Infiniband outlet). The box contains
> 3  standalone RAID-6 controllers capable to deliver 300 MB/sec each.
> The box has 4 cores at 3GHz, so 3 parallel dd processes are delivering
> 3x300=900 MB/sec aggregate  without any problem.

Is this locally, or from the lustre client?

> This configuration perfectly works, but we are only able to achieve max
> 336 MB/sec for a striped file on a stanadlone IB client.

Is that a single-threaded test.

> Our further actions
> will be to play with the ost_num_threads and/or mds_num_threads,
> cache segment sizes, maxcmds etc. Before doing that, I however would
> seek for a guru's comment on the following: not that we will *never* be
> able to detach from the performance of a single controller due to the fact
> that our MDT and MGS are using their areas served by only one of the
> three controllers?

Could you rephrase the question?

> If the answer is "yes", then the better bet would probably be to come back
> to an  LVM-based solution which we have previously discarded as it was
> starting only at 750 MB/sec. And to place MDT, MGS and 1 OST on 3
> separate logical volumes each striped over the 3 controllers.

You hardly need to have a separate LV/controller for just the MGS.  It would
be better to have 2 OSTs and put the MGS on a small LV on the same controller
with the MDS.

> PS We had the "lnet" option set as  "networks=o2ib". Is there any
>      chance that we were using IPoIB in the place of RDMA? This
>      could explain low performance, as well.  A.

No, that would happen only if you had "networks=tcp".

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.

_______________________________________________
Lustre-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.clusterfs.com/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss

Reply via email to