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In HPC the amount of data is rapidly increasing and very often the limited I/O bandwidth of the filesystem proves to be the determining factor of overall performance for the computer system with increasing model complexity and spatial resolution. A mature concept has been developed by NEC for a global parallel file system, which eliminates this bottleneck and significantly increases the availability.
All Linux HPC Clusters with InfiniBand Infrastructure can now be equipped with NEC LXFS, this being a high performance parallel file system based on Lustre technology. NEC has developed its own solution which complements the performance of Lustre by adding outstanding reliability. By utilising a building-block approach, it is very easy to handle and to scale. Moreover, a procedure was developed to considerably simplify installation and commissioning. This solution was jointly developed with a customer in the automotive industry and is now being used in the daily production process.
The complete NEC LXFS solution includes both the software and associated hardware components, such as Metadata Server and Object Storage Server which provide the disk resources and is fully integration into NEC OSCAR-Pro.
NEC LXFS consists of one Metadata Block and at least one Object Store Block. The servers in both blocks are bound together in a failover configuration and are able to cope with failures of hardware components. All components have multi-layer redundancies at the software and the hardware level. The Metadata Block is responsible for metadata services and it also takes the management role of the file server cluster.
The Object Store Block is the basic element of the scalability provided by NEC‘s approach. The integrated file servers in active-active failover configuration manage multiple Object Storage Targets. The bandwidth, as well as capacity, of the parallel filesystem scales with the number of Object Store Blocks. NEC provides analysis, consulting, optimization and training for the efficient use of NEC LXFS and also wider, ongoing support after the installation phase.
NEC LXFS offers the greatest flexibility in terms of bandwidth and capacity. The Object Store Blocks may vary according to customer requirements. Just as the storage capacity of the parallel file system scales with the number of Object Store Targets, the I/O bandwidth also scales with the number of Object Store Targets.
NEC has always focussed on providing high system availability and reliability, hence the overall design of NEC LXFS ensures continuous operation. Multiple layers of redundancy both at the hardware and software level are implemented, such as RAID6, multiple controllers and failover servers. NEC also carefully selected all system components. The monitoring of the system is transparent, flexible and adjustable and an automatic notification system informs about critical events.
