CephFS Testing for High Performance Computing

Sandia National Laboratories conducted several sets of experiments on a SoftIron HyperDrive CephFS cluster attached to Stria, a ThunderX2-based HPC system.  The first set of experiments uses the well-known IOR and MDTEST benchmarks. These experiments provide both proof of functionality and a baseline of performance.  A second set of experiments are drawn from Sandia’s Trilinos computational science library know as IOSS. Using ioshell in an experiment which copies data to and from CephFS allowed experimenters to mimic the I/O behavior of an important class of Sandia applications. The third set of experiments involved the LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator, originally developed at Sandia, as an example of a periodic checkpointing code which uses POSIX I/O instead of IOSS. LAMMPS is well-known in the computational science community for its portability and scalability to large problem sizes. As such, it’s another useful example of application performance of CephFS.