[gpfsug-discuss] GPFS best practises : end user standpoint

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On Tue, 2018-01-16 at 15:47 +0000, Carl Zetie wrote:
> Maybe this would make for a good session at a future user group
> meeting -- perhaps as an interactive session? IBM could potentially
> provide a facilitator from our Design practice.
>  

Most of it in my view is standard best practice regardless of the file
system in use.

So in our mandatory training for the HPC, we tell our users don't use
whacked out characters in your file names and directories. Specifically
no backticks, no asterik's, no question marks, no newlines (yes
really), no slashes (either forward or backward) and for Mac users
don't start the name with a space (forces sorting to the top). We
recommend sticking to plain ASCII so no accented characters either
(harder if your native language is not English I guess but we are UK
based so...). We don't enforce that but if it causes the user problems
then they are on their own.

We also strongly recommend using ISO 8601 date formats in file names to
get date sorting from a directory listing too. Surprisingly not widely
known about, but a great "life hack".

Then it boils down to don't create zillions of files. I would love to
be able to somehow do per directory file number quota's where one could
say set a default of a few thousand. Users would then have to justify
needing a larger quota. Sure you can set a file number quota but that
does not stop them putting them all in one directory.

If users really need to have zillions of files then charge them more so
you can afford to beef up your metadata disks to SSD.


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG