Hi Will--
On 11/30/2004 16:44, William P. Baird wrote:
> 1. Does Lustre run on an Altix?
>
> The only data point I have on the subject is when Rob Farber asked the
> same question back in August. Does anyone know if this has changed
> since then?
The current status is that we think so, but have not verified.
We have been in touch with SGI, and we both believe that if you run the
SLES9 kernel (which supports both Altix and Lustre), it should work right
out of the box. But we have not had time to verify that this is true, and
we have not pursued any Altix-specific optimizations yet.
Many sites have offered to give us access to Altix nodes, to see how things
behave, and we will take someone up on this offer in the new year. It seems
quite likely to me that at least one site will run Lustre in production on
an Altix before mid-year.
> 2. Multiple infiniband interfaces?
>
> Is it possible to bind multiple interfaces with the infiniband NAL? For
> example, if I had 4 4x infiniband coming from a node capable of handling
> that bandwidth, could I stripe across it using your IB NAL?
The answer is pretty much the same: conceptually, yes. But nobody has done
it yet, we haven''t optimized for it yet, and I have no idea what kind
of
machine it takes to saturate 4x IB.
> 3. Voltaire IB NAL? What is the issue?
>
> If I may ask, what is the issue with Voltaire not being supported yet?
Just
> testing or something else?
The current Infiniband landscape, for a vendor like us, is a disaster --
three distinct software stacks is almost the worst possible situation. And
as you might imagine, I am not rushing to do a lot of work that is maybe of
no business value.
The Voltaire stack is not supported yet because people haven''t told us
that
it''s important, or that they are interested in paying for Lustre on the
Voltaire stack. Conceivably one can run the Mellanox/TopSpin/OpenIB-gen-1
driver stack on Voltaire hardware just fine, and some of our customers and
partners are experimenting with that right now. Too early to say how well
that''s going to work in practice.
It''s possible that we will build a NAL for the Voltaire stack, and we
can do
so in relatively short order -- if customers tell us that this should be a
priority.
> 4. Same lustre FS over different fabrics simultaneously (ie IB and
> Ethernet) ?
>
> I have been looking at the Portlas config and I am unsure whether or not I
> can bind multiple different network types while still having the same FS
> available on both. My example would be if my OSS''s and
MDS''s had
> GigE and IB on them, could I have the FS available under both for different
> networks IB native NAL and an IP ethernet?
This should not be a problem (for any number of different fabric types).
These kinds of configurations are just being supported for the first time in
Lustre 1.4.
Hope that helps--
-Phil