Nehalem and Memory Configurations

4/8/2009 - Comments

The Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) based systems bring a whole new level of memory bandwidth to the HPC party. But the new architecture brings with it some options that allow you to trade memory price, memory performance, and memory capacity. I want to spend a little bit of time reviewing various memory configuration options and their impact on memory bandwidth.

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Jeff - Comments

Introduction to Nehalem-EP

4/6/2009 - Comments

I think you’ve heard by now that Intel has released a new processor, the Xeon 5500 (code-named Nehalem-EP). While the consumer version of this processor has been released as the Core i7, this is server version of the processor. It is a sea change for Intel processors for a number of reasons that I want to present.

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Jeff - Comments

File System Aging – What You Don’t Know

2/19/2009 - Comments

We all get old and as a result we slow down. What many people don’t know is that as file systems age, they get slower as well. Just as people are different, so are file systems. Some age gracefully and still perform well, while others age quickly and performance tanks very fast. This applies to any file system but somehow it goes unnoticed for parallel file systems in the HPCC world. In this blog I want to discuss this and warn people to carefully examine their options.

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Jeff - Comments

Great Tips on SSDs

2/18/2009 - Comments

There is a new article at PC Perspective that talks about the really hot Intel SSDs. But it goes beyond a normal review and gets into some of the guys of SSDs and talks about an important topic - file system performance as it ages. So, I want to write about the review and point out the file system aging problems (which I will write about later).

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Jeff - Comments

How Well Do You Know Your Data?

1/20/2009 - Comments

If you are sensing a pattern to some of my blogs, you are probably correct. J One of the reasons I write so much about HPCC storage is that this is one of the biggest headaches for HPC right now. I hope everyone is learning something from these articles/blogs.

In this blog I want to talk about knowing your current storage and its behavior. Storage almost seems to be alive in the respect that it grows every day (“It’s alive!”). Files are created, sometimes deleted, accessed, etc. However, how well do you truly know how your storage behaves? How many files are created every day? How many are deleted? How many are accessed?

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Jeff - Comments




Things You Didn’t Know About Solid State Disks (SSDs)
1/7/2009 - Comments

I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard about SSDs. They are the current technology rave in storage. They have, as their name suggest, no moving parts. They use NAND for storing data, much like flash drives. What makes them so attractive is:

• They have no moving parts, so you can drop them without losing data (as long as they don’t smash)
• Theoretically they use less power than a typical hard drive
• They can have better performance than standard hard drives (IOPS and throughput).

Therefore it’s fairly evident that SSDs are the subject of so much development, investment, and curiosity.

In this blog, I want to tell you a bit about SSDs, focusing on aspects of them that you probably didn’t know. More importantly, I want to point their current problems and limitations that you probably didn’t know about (TANSTAFFL).

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Jeff - Comments