On Apr 30, 2018, at 07:11, Thackeray, Neil L <ne...@illinois.edu> wrote: > > Sorry, I left out file size. We don't foresee growing tremendously. The plan > is for researchers to upload their data, get the results, and copy it down to > a mounted file system. This is going to be used by multiple researchers, and > we will be charging for compute time. We really don't want this cluster to be > used for storing data outside of the time needed for their computations. We > may just start with 100TB of SSD storage.
One of the major benefits of Lustre is that it can be used directly for large-scale computing. Having users copy data to/from Lustre is fairly inefficient (though surprisingly copying files to/from a direct Lustre mount can be faster than FTP or SCP or other network copy tools). You'd be better off to increase the size of your Lustre filesystem, enough that users can store "projects" there for some time while they compute, rather than needing to move the data on/off the filesystem a lot. While using an all-SSD filesystem is appealing, you might find better performance with some kind of hybrid storage, like ZFS + L2ARC + Metadata Allocation Class (this feature is in development, target 2018-09, depending on your timeframe). You definitely want your MDT(s) to be SSDs, especially if you use the new Data-on-MDT feature to store small files tehre. The OSTs can be HDDs to give you a lot more capacity for the same price. Cheers, Andreas > -----Original Message----- > From: lustre-discuss <lustre-discuss-boun...@lists.lustre.org> On Behalf Of > Philippe Weill > Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2018 1:14 AM > To: lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org > Subject: Re: [lustre-discuss] Do I need Lustre? > > > > Le 27/04/2018 à 19:07, Thackeray, Neil L a écrit : >> I’m new to the cluster realm, so I’m hoping for some good advice. We >> are starting up a new cluster, and I’ve noticed that lustre seems to be used >> widely in datacenters. The thing is I’m not sure the scale of our cluster >> will need it. >> >> We are planning a small cluster, starting with 6 -8 nodes with 2 GPUs >> per node. They will be used for Deep Learning, MRI data processing, >> and Matlab among other things. With the size of the cluster we figure >> that 10Gb networking will be sufficient. We aren’t going to allow persistent >> storage on the cluster. Users will just upload and download data. I’m mostly >> concerned about I/O speeds. I don’t know if NFS would be fast enough to >> handle the data. >> >> We are hoping that the cluster will grow over time. We are already talking >> about buying more nodes next fiscal year. >> >> Thanks. >> > > hello > > you didn't say anything about filesystem size needed and if you are thinking > to grow fast we also run a small cluster ( 20 nodes ) but for climate data > modeling results and satellite atmospheric data analysis we are growing at > least 300TB per year (2PB now) and it's easier for us to grow with lustre > > > -- > Weill Philippe - Administrateur Systeme et Reseaux > CNRS/UPMC/IPSL LATMOS (UMR 8190) > _______________________________________________ > lustre-discuss mailing list > lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org > http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org > _______________________________________________ > lustre-discuss mailing list > lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org > http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Lustre Principal Architect Intel Corporation _______________________________________________ lustre-discuss mailing list lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org
