Monash University

Monash University Background

Monash University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1958, it is the second oldest university in the State of Victoria. The university has a number of campuses, four of which are in Victoria (Clayton, Caulfield, Peninsula, and Parkville), and one in Malaysia. Monash also has a research and teaching centre in Prato, Italy, a graduate research school in Mumbai, India and a graduate school in Suzhou, China. Monash University courses are also delivered at other locations, including South Africa.

Project Introduction

Project Background

Pacific Teck partnered with Intel and Dell to perform a 1.1PB Lustre installation at Monash University.Configuration

2 metadata servers and 6 object storage service servers set up in pairs. All servers were Dell PowerEdge R630 with E5-2660 v3 CPUs and 15K SAS. The interconnect selected was EDR and this was the first EDR based project in Australia.

Results

Pacific Teck’s Role

Pacific Teck worked closely with Intel to communicate the necessary information and test the builds. When installing Lustre these hardware variables as well as software variables need to be taken into account to make a custom build for each environment. In a dynamic environment, there have been some cases where variables change before the build is implemented and must be redone. It is a complicated process that Pacific Teck helped Monash, Intel and Dell navigate successfully and achieved performance of over 20GB/s.