HPC file system parameter evaluation

• Parameterevaluation von Dateisystemen in Hochleistungsrechnen

Simons, Ruben; Müller, Matthias S. (Thesis advisor); Kunkel, Julian (Thesis advisor); Martin, Philipp (Consultant)

Aachen : RWTH Aachen University (2022)
Master Thesis

Masterarbeit, RWTH Aachen University, 2022

Abstract

To ensure optimal performance for applications in the field of high-performance computing, a fast, parallel file system is important. Therefore, the effects of file system parameters on the performance of applications were examined in the context of this work. Mainly the parameters of the BeeGFS file system, which was created for the duration of an application execution, were varied. Tests were also performed on a central LUSTRE file system. Five benchmarks were used to run tests with different parameter combination in order to test the performance of the file system for different use cases. Client parameters, chunk size parameters as well as Remote Direct Memory Access(RDMA) parameters were considered for BeeGFS, while striping parameters were varied for LUSTRE. When looking at the results, no effects could be observed by varying the client parameters. However, differences were noticed by varying the chunk size as well as the RDMA parameters. While the best chunk size setting for the application performance varies per application, no performance gain could be observed when varying the RDMA parameters compared to the default setting. For LUSTRE, small block sizes for striping and a larger number of striping targets show the best performance in the tests used.