Demonstrating Lustre over a 100Gbps wide area network of 3,500km

As part of the SCinet Research Sandbox at the Supercomputing 2011 conference, Indiana University (IU) demonstrated use of the Lustre high performance parallel file system over a dedicated 100 Gbps wide area network (WAN) spanning more than 3,500 km (2,175 mi). This demonstration functioned as a proof of concept and provided an opportunity to study Lustre's performance over a 100 Gbps WAN. To characterize the performance of the network and file system, low level iperf network tests, file system tests with the IOR benchmark, and a suite of real-world applications reading and writing to the file system were run over a latency of 50.5 ms. In this article we describe the configuration and constraints of the demonstration and outline key findings.