Storage requirements

[lcebaman]

What are the storage requirements to run the io500.sh config-minimal.ini benchmark ? Does this depend on the number of MPI processes? With just 2 MPI processes 2 files of more than 200GB each are created, this can quickly scale out of control if run on 10 fully populated nodes.

[JulianKunkel]

It depends on the performance of your system. As the write phase runs for at least 300s a first estimate is the write performance of your system * 300. But that is for IOR Easy only. IOR hard typically leads to less throughput but runs as well for 300s.

[lcebaman]

we are quite storage capacity limited at the moment. Will the IO500 results on 2 MPI processes be a good indicator of our IO performance?

[JulianKunkel]

You could run the benchmark for a shorter stonewall time (e.g. 30s) instead.
It depends on how many (storage) servers you may have. Having two MPI processes but 10 storage servers will not be able to exploit the available bandwidth as it will be bound by the performance of the two clients.
Personally, I would say it isn't sensible to run with less MPI processes than storage servers. Probably 2x clients are at least needed to somewhat get close to available performance.