Suggestions for suitable hardware to run a Grid SE

This page list ssuggestions for hardware to run a grid SE. You may also want to look at:

https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/wiki/Performance_and_Tuning

Head node requirement discussion

Memory 
CPU
Required Services
Database Issues

Disk server requirement discussion

Network capabilities.

Limiting factor is LAN access by worker nodes needed by of your storage.

Assuming that your WNs have 1Gbps NICs, then the ~ absolute maximum your disk server (DS) requires is (<#_of_WNs>/<#_of_DSs>) Gbps. IE to match the disk server bandwidth to possible client bandwidth needs...

A correction to this is to incorporate the fact that your DSs are of different size. And so rather dividing <#_of_WNs> by <#_of_DSs>. Then take the relative proportion that the DS is expected to be of your whole SE. Ie rate= (<#_of_WNs>*<Size_of_newDS>/<Total_size_of_SE>) Gbps.

This calculation assumes you are going to max out the network connectivity of your WNs. If you want a better estimation. You can calculate the network capacity needed by your WNs to be ( as an example) ~25Mbps per job slot. Therefore if you had 500 job slots, you would require that your storage would have 12.5Gbps of network capcity. If you only had 5 disk servers then each would require 2.5Gbps of network capacity.

The addidtion concept would then say that this 12.5Gbps needs to be split over my Storage, I current have 100TB of storage, I am buying 150TB more in X number of servers therefore the new servers need to have 12.5* 150/(100+150)/X Gbps. ie 7.5/X Gbps

A site might also want to take into account the capabilities of their backbone connection WNs to their disk servers. -

This page is a Key Document, and is the responsibility of Brian Davies. It was last reviewed on 2015-02-17 when it was considered to be 10% complete. It was last judged to be accurate on 2014-10-15.