Supported by the National Science Foundation Collaborator: University of Michigan Collaborator: Michigan State University Collaborator: Wayne State University Collaborator: Indiana University

OSIRIS at Van Andel Institute will enable VAI bioinformaticians to work with MSU researchers to better understand Parkinson’s disease and cancer, and will allow access to VAI researchers with MSU appointments to access the computational resources at ICER.

The OSiRIS site at Van Andel is deployed and managed similar to other OSiRIS sites. The 3 nodes there are part of the multi-institutional OSiRIS cluster and OSD are partitioned into a separate Ceph Crush tree to be used in rules defining cache tier pools.


Clients at VAI (and elsewhere) will have reads and writes directed transparently through the Ceph cache tier pool located at their site.

One drawback of this configuration is the “and elsewhere”. Unfortunately Ceph does not offer a way to direct clients to the backing pool for data that is in sync with the cache. Clients not at Van Andel will see a marked reduction in performance due to their requests having to utilize the cache. This is understood and expected - the goal is to improve performance for VAI users within the limits of the cache while allowing for sufficient storage to keep data long term on the larger backing pool replicated on the other 3 OSiRIS sites.

Performance Benchmarking

Before moving this site into production we spent some time collecting benchmarks with this caching configuration using clients at Van Andel.

First a simple comparison using RADOS bench on a pool with a cache tier and one without.

Without cache overlay:

Total time run:         120.164
Total writes made:      11274
Write size:             4194304
Object size:            4194304
Bandwidth (MB/sec):     375.289
Stddev Bandwidth:       63.0688
Max bandwidth (MB/sec): 456
Min bandwidth (MB/sec): 168
Average IOPS:           93
Stddev IOPS:            15
Max IOPS:               114
Min IOPS:               42
Average Latency(s):     0.170519
Stddev Latency(s):      0.0805575
Max latency(s):         1.30727
Min latency(s):         0.0679402


The one with a cache tier we ran long enough to see the cache begin to flush. For this test the cache max_bytes setting was intentionally set quite low so it began to flush sooner. You can see a slight reduction in throughput when objects start to flush.

Total time run:         3000.04
Total writes made:      926281
Write size:             4194304
Object size:            4194304
Bandwidth (MB/sec):     1235.02
Stddev Bandwidth:       39.1896
Max bandwidth (MB/sec): 1384
Min bandwidth (MB/sec): 1052
Average IOPS:           308
Stddev IOPS:            9
Max IOPS:               346
Min IOPS:               263
Average Latency(s):     0.0518185
Stddev Latency(s):      0.0174813
Max latency(s):         0.46436
Min latency(s):         0.0168139


Here is a snapshot of Ceph pool usage during this test as well. The pool cou.VAI.fs is the backing pool replicated at the 3 non-VAI sites (UM, MSU, WSU). The pool cou.VAI.fs.cache is the cache overlay pool replicated on the three nodes at VAI.

Configuration Details

As a first step, when initializing OSD on the VAI nodes we had the following in ceph.conf to place them correctly in our Crush hierarchy. It’s important that they come up outside the default tree to avoid data being replicated to them. Details here may vary depending on default crush rules - perhaps a cluster could have a default rule to use devices in class hdd so a new device in class ssd will not be used by the default replication rules.

crush_location = root=cache host=vai-stor-nvc01 rack=vai-rack building=vai-gr member=vai

Once everything is online and OSD initialized we end up with a crush tree as follows:

-77         30.01904 root cache                                                  
-76         30.01904     member vai                                              
-91         30.01904         building vai-gr                                     
-74         30.01904             rack vai-rack                                   
-88         10.00635                 host vai-stor-nvc01                         
387   ssd    2.50159                     osd.387             up  1.00000 1.00000 
393   ssd    2.50159                     osd.393             up  1.00000 1.00000 
397   ssd    2.50159                     osd.397             up  1.00000 1.00000 
399   ssd    2.50159                     osd.399             up  1.00000 1.00000 
-75         10.00635                 host vai-stor-nvc02                         
405   ssd    2.50159                     osd.405             up  1.00000 1.00000 
409   ssd    2.50159                     osd.409             up  1.00000 1.00000 
413   ssd    2.50159                     osd.413             up  1.00000 1.00000 
417   ssd    2.50159                     osd.417             up  1.00000 1.00000 
-73         10.00635                 host vai-stor-nvc03                         
372   ssd    2.50159                     osd.372             up  1.00000 1.00000 
376   ssd    2.50159                     osd.376             up  1.00000 1.00000 
380   ssd    2.50159                     osd.380             up  1.00000 1.00000 
384   ssd    2.50159                     osd.384             up  1.00000 1.00000 

Note: We manage Ceph configuration and OSD initialization using a Puppet module

Create replicated crush rule named ‘vai-cache’ with crush root ‘vai’, failure domain ‘host’ and using only ‘ssd’ device classes. The SSD specification is not strictly required since there are no other classes of device under the vai root.

ceph osd crush rule create-replicated vai-cache vai host ssd

Create pool following our typical naming scheme with 512 PG. With only 12 OSD more PG doesn’t make sense and just creates undue load on the OSD hosts. More information and a calculator: https://ceph.com/pgcalc/

ceph osd pool create cou.VAI.fs.cache 512 512 replicated vai-cache

Assign the pool to be a cache pool overlaying the VAI CephFS pool in writeback mode (vs read-only mode). As far as the docs indicate there is only one hit_set_type but you have to set it or the cluster will generate a warning.

ceph osd tier add cou.VAI.fs cou.VAI.fs.cache
ceph osd tier cache-mode cou.VAI.fs.cache writeback
ceph osd tier set-overlay cou.VAI.fs cou.VAI.fs.cache
ceph osd pool set cosbench_cache_tier hit_set_type bloom

The following settings for cache flushing are actually the defaults (except max bytes). We may lower the flush percentages to ensure the cache keeps more free space available - the link back to other OSiRIS sites is fairly slow (4Gb) so our final numbers depend on whether we need to optimize more as a write cache or to keep more hot data in the cache.

ceph osd pool set cou.VAI.fs.cache target_max_bytes 9901930829414

# % of max_bytes_full to start flushing dirty objects
ceph osd pool set cou.VAI.fs.cache cache_target_dirty_ratio .3

# when to flush harder
ceph osd pool set cou.VAI.fs.cache cache_target_dirty_high_ratio .4

# also start evicting clean objects 
ceph osd pool set cou.VAI.fs.cache cache_target_full_ratio .7