Re: [tlug] Making better use of SSDs?

[Satoshi Nagayasu <satoshi.nagayasu@example.com>]

Hi Raymond,

2012/05/29 0:28, Raymond Wan wrote:
> On Monday, May 28, 2012 05:15 PM, satoshi.nagayasu@example.com
> wrote:
> > I recommend #1 option, and have your own experiments to examine
> > whether SSD benefits your system performance.
> ...
> > Generally speaking, it's safe to say SSD would increase the performance.
> > But practically, you need to determine a type of workload (or a bottleneck
> > of workload) that you're running. And it's really fun! :)
>
>
> That is true.  Actually, the software we are considering are
> neither database systems nor Unix tools like 'sort'.  Sorry
> for mentioning them in my original post -- they weren't
> meant to mislead any of you, but to generalize my question.
>
> The software we are using are actually bioinformatics tools.
>    While there are many users, the user base is still tiny
> compared PostgreSQL.  So, there aren't many benchmarks that
> look into how they perform with combinations of HDDs and SSDs.

Sounds pretty cool.

I built a distributed BLAST system, one of the most popular
software in bioinformatics for similarity search in genome
database, for my master thesis in grad school.
It was really fun! :)

BLAST is a kind of software that has large amount of I/O
operations, particularly sequential read.

If you're using similar software, I recommend you to use SSD
with multi-core CPU to execute multiple queries at once.

You will be able to take advantage of SSD in terms of throughput
(not a single query response), because executing multiple
sequential reads would (theoretically) act as random read
within a single spindle (hard drive).

Regards,
--
NAGAYASU Satoshi <satoshi.nagayasu@example.com>