A Case Study: Performance Analysis and Optimization of SAS® Grid Computing Scaling on a Shared Storage

SAS® Grid Computing is a scale-out SAS® solution that enables SAS applications to better utilize I/O and compute intensive computing resources. This requires the use of high-performance shared storage (SS) that allows all servers to access the same file system. SS may be implemented via traditional NFS NAS or clustered file systems (CFS) like GPFS. This paper uses the Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre (IEEL) file system, a parallel, distributed CFS, for a case study of performance scalability of SAS Grid Computing nodes on SS. The paper qualifies the performance of a standardized SAS workload running on IEEL at scale. Lustre is traditionally used for large block sequential I/O. We present the tuning changes necessary for the optimization of IEEL for SAS applications. In addition, results from the scaling of SAS Cluster jobs running on IEEL are presented.