Establishing Applicability of SSDs to LHC Tier-2 Hardware Configuration
Samuel C Skipsey (1), Wahid Bhimji (2), Mike Kenyon (3) ((1), University of Glasgow, (2) University of Edinburgh, (3) IT Department, CERN)
TL;DR
This paper evaluates the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of SSDs compared to traditional hard disks for high I/O workloads in LHC Tier-2 computing environments, focusing on real-world performance and upgrade considerations.
Contribution
It provides an empirical assessment of SSDs' applicability in Tier-2 hardware, including performance comparisons and cost analysis for large-scale scientific data processing.
Findings
SSD performance surpasses spinning disks in I/O intensive tasks
Cost-effectiveness of SSDs depends on workload and upgrade context
SSD deployment can improve Tier-2 data processing efficiency
Abstract
Solid State Disk technologies are increasingly replacing high-speed hard disks as the storage technology in high-random-I/O environments. There are several potentially I/O bound services within the typical LHC Tier-2 - in the back-end, with the trend towards many-core architectures continuing, worker nodes running many single-threaded jobs and storage nodes delivering many simultaneous files can both exhibit I/O limited efficiency. We estimate the effectiveness of affordable SSDs in the context of worker nodes, on a large Tier-2 production setup using both low level tools and real LHC I/O intensive data analysis jobs comparing and contrasting with high performance spinning disk based solutions. We consider the applicability of each solution in the context of its price/performance metrics, with an eye on the pragmatic issues facing Tier-2 provision and upgrades
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