[gpfsug-discuss] GPFS Routers

[Marc A Kaplan]

Thanks for spelling out the situation more clearly.  This is beyond my 
knowledge and expertise.
But perhaps some other participants on this forum will chime in!

I may be missing something, but asking "What is Lustre LNET?" via google 
does not yield good answers.
It would be helpful to have some graphics (pictures!) of typical, useful 
configurations.  Limiting myself to a few minutes of searching, I couldn't 
find any.

I "get" that Lustre users/admin with lots of nodes and several switching 
fabrics find it useful, but beyond that...

I guess the answer will be "Performance!" -- but the obvious question is: 
Why not "just" use IP - that is the Internetworking Protocol!
So rather than sweat over LNET, why not improve IP to work better over 
several IBs?

>From a user/customer point of view where "I needed this yesterday", short 
of having an "LNET for GPFS", I suggest considering reconfiguring your 
nodes, switches, storage 
to get better performance.  If you need to buy some more hardware, so be 
it.

--marc



From:   Aaron Knister <aaron.s.knister at nasa.gov>
To:     <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Date:   09/20/2016 09:23 AM
Subject:        Re: [gpfsug-discuss] GPFS Routers
Sent by:        gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org



Hi Marc,

Currently we serve three disparate infiniband fabrics with three 
separate sets of NSD servers all connected via FC to backend storage.

I was exploring the idea of flipping that on its head and having one set 
of NSD servers but would like something akin to Lustre LNET routers to 
connect each fabric to the back-end NSD servers over IB. I know there's 
IB routers out there now but I'm quite drawn to the idea of a GPFS 
equivalent of Lustre LNET routers, having used them in the past.

I suppose I could always smush some extra HCAs in the NSD servers and do 
it that way but that got really ugly when I started factoring in 
omnipath. Something like an LNET router would also be useful for GNR 
users who would like to present to both an IB and an OmniPath fabric 
over RDMA.

-Aaron

On 9/12/16 10:48 AM, Marc A Kaplan wrote:
> Perhaps if you clearly describe what equipment and connections you have
> in place and what you're trying to accomplish, someone on this board can
> propose a solution.
>
> In principle, it's always possible to insert proxies/routers to "fake"
> any two endpoints into "believing" they are communicating directly.
>
>
>
>
>
> From:        Aaron Knister <aaron.s.knister at nasa.gov>
> To:        <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
> Date:        09/11/2016 08:01 PM
> Subject:        Re: [gpfsug-discuss] GPFS Routers
> Sent by:        gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> After some googling around, I wonder if perhaps what I'm thinking of was
> an I/O forwarding layer that I understood was being developed for x86_64
> type machines rather than some type of GPFS protocol router or proxy.
>
> -Aaron
>
> On 9/11/16 5:02 PM, Knister, Aaron S. (GSFC-606.2)[COMPUTER SCIENCE
> CORP] wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> A while back I seem to recall hearing about a mechanism being developed
>> that would function similarly to Lustre's LNET routers and effectively
>> allow a single set of NSD servers to talk to multiple RDMA fabrics
>> without requiring the NSD servers to have infiniband interfaces on each
>> RDMA fabric. Rather, one would have a set of GPFS gateway nodes on each
>> fabric that would in effect proxy the RDMA requests to the NSD server.
>> Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Just curious if it's still on
>> the roadmap.
>>
>> -Aaron
>>
>>
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>>
>
> --
> Aaron Knister
> NASA Center for Climate Simulation (Code 606.2)
> Goddard Space Flight Center
> (301) 286-2776
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> gpfsug-discuss mailing list
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>
>
>
>
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-- 
Aaron Knister
NASA Center for Climate Simulation (Code 606.2)
Goddard Space Flight Center
(301) 286-2776
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