Slashdot Mirror
IBM's High Performance File System
HoosierPeschke writes "BetaNews is running a story about IBM's new file system, General Parallel File System (GPFS). The short and skinny is that the new file system attained a 102 Gigabyte per second transfer rate. The size of the file system is also astonishing at 1.6 petabytes (petabyte == 1,024 terabytes). IBM has up a page with more information and specs on the system.."
There is nothing new about GPFS. Its been around for years.
Atleast someone can make a new filesystem... *cough* Microsoft *cough*
But what kind of performance does this give on relatively small ( 10Tbytes) file systems? Petabyte arrays are still kind of out of reach for most.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Are there open source drivers for this FS that can perhaps be integrated into Linux or the *BSD projects?
Is this stuff available in a fashion where we might see it ported for use on standard x86 hardware? Is it GPL'd? I want this in my living room!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Wow that"s fast stuff, plus with the ability to slow light to save energy IBM should have some great new systems coming out!
Britney Simpson
I thought this article was going to be about IBM's HPFS from OS/2.
That aside, how do I get one for my TiVo?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's basically data striping across 1000 disks. I suppose the hard part is coordinating all of that parallelism.
So, could someone who actually knows this stuff tell me how well I did?
GPFS is a cluster file system.. its in a completely different category.
GPFS Whitepaper - http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/soft ware/whitepapers/gpfsprimer.pdf
"GPFS is a cluster file system providing normal application interfaces, and has been available on AIX® operating system-based clusters since 1998 and Linux operating system-based clusters since 2001. GPFS distinguishes itself from other cluster file systems by providing concurrent, high-speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes in an AIX 5L cluster, a Linux cluster or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX 5L and Linux machines. The processors supporting this cluster may be a mixture of IBM System p5(TM), p5 and pSeries® machines, IBM BladeCenter(TM) or IBM xSeries® machines based on Intel® or AMD processors. GPFS supports the current releases of AIX 5L and selected releases of Red Hat and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server distributions. See the GPFS FAQ1 for a current list of tested machines and also tested Linux distribution levels. It is possible to run GPFS on compatible machines from other hardware vendors, but you should contact your IBM sales representative for details.
GPFS for AIX 5L and GPFS for Linux are derived from the same programming source and differ principally in adapting to the different hardware and operating system environments. The functionality of the two products is identical. GPFS V2.3 allows AIX 5L and Linux nodes, including Linux nodes on different machine architectures, to exist in the same cluster with shared access to the same GPFS file system. A cluster is a managed collection of computers which are connected via a network and share access to storage. Storage may be shared directly using storage networking capabilities provided by a storage vendor or by using IBM supplied capabilities which simulate a storage area network (SAN) over an IP network.
GPFS V2.3 is enhanced over previous releases of GPFS by introducing the capability to share data between clusters. This means that a cluster with proper authority can mount and directly access data owned by another cluster. It is possible to create clusters which own no data and are created for the sole purpose of accessing data owned by other clusters. The data transport uses either GPFS SAN simulation capabilities over a general network or SAN extension hardware.
GPFS V2.3 also adds new facilities in support of disaster recovery, recoverability and scaling. See the product publications for details2."
GPFS is one of the more entrenched parallel cluster filesystems available. (others include the classic vax cluster fs, Tru64 cfs, redhat gfs, adic stornext, lustre, Sanergy, polyserve, others) GPFS has been running on IBM's high performance clusters for a decade or more. I've used it, and it's as robust as any of the others I listed above.
I'll caution everyone that you can get 100GB/s of throughput, only if you have a hundred million dollar collection of computers and disks like Livermore has.
Will this mean that you can share storage more easily, maybe. It certainly seems to reduce sharks/ESS into an expensive interface for attaching discs (but there again there just a load of discs with a AIX box or 2 and SSA adapters to conenct the discs anyhow).
:).
Given the managment/maintenance levels of discs wil be more intergrated and distrubutable with this I cant help but think that OS/features and the trend in (and rightly so) resiliance,easy and sharing resources approach towards what Plan 9 was setout to be.
The more we move on the more we seem to get towards the lego-type appraoch to IT were you can just buy another box of bricks and add on and keep your older bricks instead of throwing the whole lot out and/or hacksawing the end of a brick of and gluing it onto the side of....
Storage wise this is a nice step forwards and having worked on AIX and its many filesystems and managment tools and the ease of getting the job done with the option to get clever if you wish (you chose and not forced) this looks funky albeit its RAID for SAN's in a way.
What I realy want is a FS that will propergate automaticaly and resiliantly in a way that accomodates network diversaty already and I still come down to me wanting, what is all intent a filesystem sat on a database sat on a p2p network, alas atm performance would suck, least today but you know how long code takes to get right and how fast hardware moves - remember alot of code in windows XP has origins to when it was written on a humble 386 cpu if not lower.
What this does show is how netowrk/storage interfaces have moved forward and I/O requests dont hammer CPU's as much as they used to, getting there
GPFS supports the current releases of AIX 5L and selected releases of Red Hat and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server distributions. See the GPFS FAQ1 for a current list of tested machines and also tested Linux distribution levels.
ConsultingFair.com
The article, as usual for news stories, are lacking juicy tech details. Here's some I found:
The article says 102 GB/s transfer. This PDF about the ASC Purple says they have 11,000 SATA & fiber channel disks (amongst other neat stats). So cursory math says that's about 10 MB/s from each disk.
My question is how useful is that transfer? Pulling in at 102 GB/s is fast and all, but if you can't consume it then it's just ego boosting. What kind of useful data transfer can you do on it? Surely it's for parallel processing (ASC = Advanced Simulation & Computing) of some kind so can this parallel app handle 102 GB/s collectively?
:wq
petabyte !== 1,024 terabytes
petabyte == 1,000 terabytes
ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
Kibibytes is just so much more fun to say. Especially when it leads to "kibbles & bits."
The submitter and editors need to learn their numeric prefixes. Come on! This web site is supposed to be for people who understand computer technology!
A petabyte == 1000 terrabytes
A pebibyte == 1024 terrabytes
Please see the NIST definition page:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
ZFS from Sun is 128-bit. According to this guy
thats a whole load of data:
"Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2^128 blocks = 2^137 bytes = 2^140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2^140 bits) / (10^31 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.
That's a lot of gear."
So, the important question: How many Libraries of Congress is that per second?
Typical porn movies per hour (TPMH)??
AT&ROFLMAO
the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:
Real geeks use powers of two; powers of ten we're only introduced for marketing purposes, which real geeks eschew.
... 1.6 PB ought to be enough for anybody.
If not... what's the key difference between the two?
When you care about throughput as well as capacity.
We used GPFS in our production environment for about 9 months in 2004/2005. We chose it specifically because it allowed several machines to share the file system (like NFS) but with file locking. It was also supposed to be very fault tolerant with no single point of failure. We set it up using a fiberchannel SAN.
Unfortunately we had a lot of problems with it. For one, performance was quite bad in ceratin cases... doing an ls in a large directory would take a very long time. Doing finds would take a very long time. Once you had a specific file you wanted, opening and reading it was reasonable (though all disk ops were still on the slow side), but multi file operations lagged on the level of 10s of seconds or more. I think it was having to issue network checks to every machine in the set for each file or something.
Also, the CPU usage was very high across all our machines, primarly from lock manager communications. It really taxed the system. And perhaps worst of all, it would caused crashes sometimes. A single machine in the set would die (usually a GPFS assert), and though that didn't break the set permanently, a multi-minute freeze on all disk reads would take place until the set determined the machine was unavailable. We spoke with IBM about all this stuff... provided debugging output and everything, we used the latest patches. But we never got the issues resolved. It was a very rough few months indeed. I probably averaged 4 hours sleep per night.
When I say "slow" what am I comparing it to? In the end we switched to NFS and we came up with a somewhat clever way to avoid the need for file locking. NFS used the same SAN hardware, but had a single point of failure: the head server. We doubled up there with warm failover. The load on all servers dropped dramatically (I'm talking from ~40 load to ~.1 load). Disk operations were orders of magnitude faster. And we've not had a single NFS related lockup or failure in the past year and a half *knocks on wood*.
Anyways -- GPFS probably has some good uses. But I would not recommend it for a very high-volume (lots of files, lots of traffic) mission critical situation. Unless they've made some major improvements.
Cheers.
The intended purpose of ASC Purple is nuclear weapons simulations.
Since they can't actually do tests, either aboveground or below, by treaty anymore, they do simulations instead. I assume these have something to do with modeling how radioactive decay affects the weapons' usability and yield over time (since I don't think they're really in the business of designing new toys, but who knows really), so that you know that a bomb is going to go "pop" instead of "fizzle" when you want it to.
I'd imagine that those kinds of simulations could easily produce tera- and petabytes of data, when run with the sort of precision and initial conditions that LLNL probably wants to use.
I think BlueGene/L (No. 1 on the list of top supercomputers, Purple is 3) is used for the same purpose. Or at least, that was their reason/excuse for purchasing it; exactly what they do with it every day is anybody's guess.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information
Um, no, that's wrong.
Bremmermann's Limit is the maximum computational speed in the physical universe (as defined by relativity and quantum mechanical limitations) and is approximately 2 x 10^47 bits per second per gram (or, for those who prefer sexagesimal, one jezend, 60^11, bits per second per gram).
Bousso's covariant entropy bound also called the holographic bound is a theoretical refinement on the Bekenstein Bound that may define the limit of how compact information may be stored, based on current understanding of quantum mechanical limits, and is theorized to be equal to approximately one yezend (60^37, or ~10^66) bits of information contained in a space enclosed by a spherical surface of 1 sq. cm.
Given this, 1 kg of matter can perform approximately 2 x 10^50 bit operations per second per kilogram, in a space much smaller than 1 liter of space. Of course, other physical constraints (non-quantum related) probably limits us to a couple of orders of magnitude less computation, in a couple of orders of magnitude more space, but of course what those limits might be is very speculative
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
640 terabytes should be enough for anybody.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Chuck Norris penis is so big that 1.6 petabyte can only store 4 seconds of Chuck Norris porn.
We ran GPFS for about 10 months. It's great for it's primary purpose, and it was pretty stable on Linux, though we had a crash or two... but the biggest problem we ran across was with large number of files. We had > 150 million small files in 10000 directories, and gpfs couldn't handle the load. I'm sure with a smaller number of files, our experience would have been very different. Waiting 10 minutes for an ls in a directory wasn't really what I considered fun. :)
Further evidence that "editor" is a misnomer 'round these parts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NTFS has supported 16 exabytes since 1993. That's about 10,000 larger than this new system. I'm not saying that NTFS is great or that IBM's accomplishment is small. But the submitter really shouldn't have said that a 1.6 petabyte filesystem is anything to write home about. Most likely every modern filesystem is at least 64 bit(16 exabytes).
Unless I forgot, a single order of magnitude is 10x, not 1000x.
Peta = 1 000 Tera = 1 000 000 Giga = 1 000 000 000 Mega
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.