topic Re: I/O Bandwidth Capacity? in Intel® Xeon® Processor and Server Products

I/O Bandwidth Capacity?

idata — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:50:29 GMT

How do I determine the I/O bandwidth capacity of a configuration like the one Bhaskar described in his demo for 1 million IOPS? Using 4K blocks, it looks like he achieved 4GB/sec or about 50% PCe 2.0 1x16 would give 16*500MB/sec or 8GB theoretical. Ignoring the OS impact, am I correct in believing that his config is limited to 8GB/sec?

Thanks,

Dave

Re: I/O Bandwidth Capacity?

Daniel_O_Intel — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:43:46 GMT

Was Bhaskar's post under the processor community?

Re: I/O Bandwidth Capacity?

idata — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:17:35 GMT

His test is described at http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server/blog/2009/09/26/the-one-million-iops-game

There's a YouTube video too. Sorry if I have the wrong group - bandwidth is a complex issue including many factors. Please advise if I should direct the question elsewhere.

Thanks,

Dave

Re: I/O Bandwidth Capacity?

Daniel_O_Intel — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:56:39 GMT

Impressive! I don't know if you'll get many responses here, but I see you should be able to comment on his blog directly. Looks like he's taken time to reply to those interested. His last post was only five days ago.

Re: I/O Bandwidth Capacity?

Bhaskar_G_Intel — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:03:56 GMT

Hello Dave,

Apologies for late reply, I don't frequent these forums very often and didn't see your post.

My solution was driving 4Gigs/s worth of data using all 5 PCIe x8 slots, its not a consumption of lot of BW by PCie standards, but yes theoretically you can drive 8GB/s (4GB/s one way) data on a x16 PCIe. I could possibly test this with larger chunk size read/writes and see maximum amount of data transfer i can achieve within SAS/SATA limits (3Gb/s per port). A modern graphics card might be a good candidate to test potential of a PCIe bus.

-Bhaskar