Boston Igloo Scalebox
The Boston Igloo ScaleBox is a platform validated and optimised for use in BeeGFS Storage Clusters. The Boston Igloo ScaleBox provides users with an easy to scale modular block for building scale-out HPC filesystems. This modular approach also allows users to start small and scale over time as cluster demand increases.
What is BeeGFS
BeeGFS® is a parallel file system, developed and optimised for high-performance computing. BeeGFS includes a distributed metadata architecture for scalability and flexibility reasons and excels in data throughput.
Key Features
- Up to 200TB per ScaleBox modules or 2PB per 42U rack.
- Best in class client throughput (3.5 GB/s write and 4.0 GB/s read with single I/O stream on FDR Infiniband).
- Best in class metadata performance: linear scalability through dynamic metadata namespace partitioning.
- Best in class storage throughput: BeeGFS® servers allow flexible choice of underlying file system to perfectly fit the given storage hardware.
Benchmarks
Metadata Operations
BeeGFS® was designed for extreme scalability. In a testbed with 20 servers and up to 640 client processes (32x the number of metadata servers), BeeGFS® delivers a sustained file creation rate of more than 500,000 creates per second, making it possible to create one billion files in as little time asabout 30 minutes.
Throughput Scalability
In the same testbed system with 20 servers - each equipped with a single node local performance of 1332 MB/s (write) and 1317 MB/s (read) - and 160 client processes, BeeGFS® a sustained throughput of 25 GB/s - which is 94.7 percent of the maximum theoretical local write and 94.1 percent of the maximum theoretical local read throughput.
On-Demand HPC Filesystem
Create Parallel File Systems on demand and on the fly: BeeGFS® on-demand allows the creation of a BeeGFS® on a set of nodes with one single command line. Possible use cases for the tool are manyfold, a few include setting up a dedicated parallel file system for a cluster job across the compute nodes used for the job, cloud computing or for fast and easy temporary setups for testing purposes.
Exascale Engagement
Fraunhofer (BeeGFS) is participating in the European Union's DEEP-ER project which is addressing the problems of the growing gap between compute speed and I/O bandwith and system resiliency for large scale systems. All the work from this engagement is being fed back into BeeGFS to ensure this product is ready for Exascale.