This presentation was about 40% product review, 20% Lustre overview, and 40% technical tutorial overview. There were no new announcements.


Points of interest:

  • About 65% of the lines of code in Lustre are provided by Intel.
  • Lustre is used HPC organizations: Manufacturing and Finance stand out.
  • Intel provides three versions of Lustre:
    • Foundation – the open source base version
    • Enterprise – the production version
    • Cloud – available on AWS and Azure, allows users to replicate in-house data structures in the cloud.
  • Enterprise Lustre:
    • Works with Omni-Path “out of the box.”
    • Security features supported include Kerberis and SELinux
    • OpenZFS snapshot for check pointing
    • Hadoop adaptor available
  • Tip for using Omni-Path: CPU locality is important. This revelation seems to repeat itself with different technologies on a regular basis. I suspect
    that it is an ongoing conflict between marketing and technical support: The former is tasked with getting people interested in a product and tends
    to say all problems are now solved, while the latter is tasked with getting the product to actually work.
  • In use on the Kraken system at the University of Tennessee.

My thoughts:

  • Basic message was that Omni-Path supports Lustre and “works out of the box.”
  • This was mainly a technical seminar so no new announcements were made.
  • Most of the audience questions dealt with product availability, compatibility, and interoperability.
  • Intel used Mellanox as a synonym for InfiniBand perhaps in an effort to cast the open standard as a single vendor product.
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