[Beowulf] how fast can NFS run?

Bruce Allen ballen at gravity.phys.uwm.edu
Wed Feb 1 10:18:07 PST 2006


> spec.org has a benchmark that is nfs-specific but it does not give you MB/s 
> for a special access pattern.
>
> Instead, it gives you operations per second as well as response time at 
> that load for a mix of different access patterns, filesizes between 1K 
> and 1M.
>
> http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#nfs

Can you tell me *roughly* how to translate this number into MB/sec?  I 
understand that it's a mixed load of requests with different sizes and 
access patterns; still my question makes sense.

I can see that on an SGI system that *should* be limited by its network 
connection (1 Gb/sec) the benchmark give around 13,000.  So I would guess 
that ~100 MB/sec corresponds to a SPECsfs97_R1.v3 (NFS version 3) 
benchmark score of around 13,000.

Similarly, I see that on an IBM system with 12 gigabit ethernet ports, the 
benchmark is around 118,000, which would correspond to around 900 MB/sec.

Michael, do these MB/s numbers look roughly right to you?  In other words 
that SPECsfs97_R1.v3 (NFS version 3) of 13,000 is around 100 MB/s?

Cheers,
 	Bruce



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