Testing the new deskside JackRabbit

This unit will be (eventually) the replacement for our older central server at our new space (woo-hoo!!!!). Right now, taking to the test track as it were. Simple machine: 16 GB ram, 4 cores, 7.5 TB of raw storage. In a deskside case. Works well for offices. This configuration would be right about $5900 list. RAID6 with one hot spare would drop it to 6TB for storage. Carving out 2 drives for OS (as I did) would bring it down to 5TB.

root@crunch:~# df -h /big
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1             4.6T   36G  4.6T   1% /big
root@crunch:~# df -m /big
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1              4768242     36783   4731459   1% /big
root@crunch:~# df  /big
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1            4882679680  37665724 4845013956   1% /big

Well, with rounding for all the conversions, call it 4.6TB usable. Bonnie and iozone numbers put it 500-600 MB/s sustained. Obviously we have some tuning to do on this (using a new kernel, so we need to adjust to it).

root@crunch:~# uname -a
Linux crunch.scalableinformatics.com 2.6.24-16-server #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:15:38 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Previous tests on 2.6.24 have shown it to be quite performance challenged, so we will likely work with a 2.6.25 build soon. Update: We are running mpiblast 1.5.0 pio on the unit to do some testing for a customer. At the same time, for laughs, I ran a quick dd command with direct IO. So we aren’t getting all the IO time, processor time, and there is contention (4 cores of 4 in use by mpiblast with IO in flight). Still, results aren’t shabby.

root@crunch:~# dd oflag=direct if=/dev/zero of=/big/file bs=1M   count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes (8.6 GB) copied, 15.3083 s, 561 MB/s