[Beowulf] zfs tuning for HJPC/cluster workloads?

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Joe Landman" <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:

> Hi folks:

Hi Joe,

>    Investigating zfs on a Solaris 10 5/08 loaded JackRabbit for a 
> customer. [...]
>
>    I am looking for ways to tune zfs, or even Solaris so we can 
> hopefully get to parity with Linux (less than 50% of Linux performance
> now c.f. http://scalability.org/?p=640 ).

Don't know if you realise this, but you have to get written
permission from Sun before being able to publish any Solaris
10 benchmarks..

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/licensing/sla.xml

# (f) You may not publish or provide the results of any benchmark
# or comparison tests run on Software to any third party without
# the prior written consent of Sun.

The Linux NFSv4 folks had to get this before being able
to post interoperability results with Solaris.

http://linux-nfs.org/pipermail/nfsv4/2005-October/002647.html

I don't believe that this restriction applies to OpenSolaris
(IANAL, YMMV, IIRC).

FWIW my own testing of ZFS under OpenSolaris, compared
with other Linux filesystems, showed the same issue for
write's but much faster read performance.  This was about
a year ago though!

http://www.csamuel.org/articles/emerging-filesystems-200709/#id2538499

cheers,
Chris
-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency