Dell PowerVault MD1200 - Manual (Page 10)

Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS
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Hardware configuration for DFC Table 3.
Server configuration
NFS SERVER PowerEdge R720
CACHE POOL Two 350GB Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD
SSD CONTROLLER Internal (slot 4)
Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 1
Storage configuration
Same as baseline, as described in Table 1
Software and firmware configuration for DFC Table 4.
Software
CACHING SOFTWARE Dell Fluid Cache for DAS v1.0
Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 2
Firmware and Drivers
PCIe SSD DRIVER
mtip32xx 1.3.7-1 latest available at the time of this study.
Recommend using mtip32xx v2.1.0
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 5 as the building block for the I/O
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.