Speaker
Description
CNAF is the national center of INFN (Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics) dedicated to Research and Development in Information and Communication Technologies. As the central computing facility of INFN, CNAF has been historically involved in the management and evolution of the most important information and data transmission services in Italy, supporting INFN activities at both national and international levels.
Recently, CNAF acquired an HPC cluster through RecoverEU funding, featuring high core count CPUs, H100 GPUs, and InfiniBand connectivity. We performed extensive system tuning with the goal of entering the Top500 list (https://top500.org). Achieving good performance was not an easy task: we struggled to find reliable and up-to-date documentation, but ultimately, we reached our target. Our presentation walks through all the steps we took to optimize the cluster and successfully enter the Top500 list.
Similarly to what we did for HPC, we tested our storage trying to enter the IO500.
The IO500 benchmark represents a paradigm shift in HPC storage evaluation. Traditional benchmarks often emphasized peak bandwidth, but modern scientific workflows, particularly those in high-energy physics and data-intensive computing, require excellent performance across multiple dimensions: sequential and random I/O, as well as metadata operations. IO500 addresses this need by providing a comprehensive suite of tests that better reflect real-world usage patterns. For facilities like CNAF, understanding performance across the full IO500 spectrum is essential for infrastructure planning and optimization.
We will show the procedure for setting up a 10-node client cluster, as per the specification of the standard IO500 benchmark, alongside the tuning of two distinct storage clusters to achieve the best performance. We successfully entered the IO500 list with two systems: one based on GPFS (a.k.a. Spectrum Scale), the other on CephFS.