Introducing: MRC Premium & MRC General
The team at the Melbourne Research Cloud (MRC) is excited to announce that we have launched an additional 10,000 virtual cores in our data centre to replace our end-of-life Supermicro hypervisors in Q1 2019. This hardware replacement is made possible by the University of Melbourne Petascale Campus Initiative.
Our new hypervisors are divided into two partitions:
- MRC Premium: Faster CPU clock speed, higher physical RAM per hypervisor for more intensive workloads.
- MRC General: Available for all MRC users.
Our performance benchmark shows the new hypervisors significantly out-perform our end-of-life Supermicro fleet in the NeCTAR cloud.
CPU performance
As shown in the benchmarking graph, the CPU performance of the new hypervisors shows a significant boost of 2.3 times for the General partition and 2.7 times for the Premium partition, over the Supermicro fleet.
The General partition also shows comparable performance to our current high performance cloud fleet in melbourne_qh2 installed in 2015.
| Type | Score | Runtime (seconds) |
|---|---|---|
| MRC Premium | 52452 | 301 |
| NeCTAR melbourne-qh2 | 47181 | 314 |
| MRC General | 44665 | 303 |
| NeCTAR Supermicro | 19051 | 367 |
All CPU Benchmark is run on m3.small VM running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with 2 vCPUs and 4096 MBs of RAM using CoreMark
Network performance
Network speed also has a significant improvement over our current hardware. The new hypervisors' throughput is 1.6 times more than for the old SuperMicro fleet.
| Type | Average Throughput (Mb/s) |
|---|---|
| MRC Premium | 11444 |
| MRC General | 11631 |
| NeCTAR melbourne-qh2 | 7558 |
| NeCTAR Supermicro | 6820 |
All tests were performed on 2x uom.general.4c16g VM with 4 vCPUs and 16384 MBs of RAM running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using iPerf
Disk performance
Root disk performance sees an increase of at least 2.1 times compared to VMs on the old Supermicro hypervisors. Write speed also see an improvement of 3 times over the Supermicro fleet.
| Type | Sequential Write (KB/s) | Sequential Read (KB/s) |
|---|---|---|
| MRC Premium | 964413 | 2010536 |
| MRC General | 970990 | 2296492 |
| NeCTAR melbourne-qh2 | 814460 | 874487 |
| NeCTAR Supermicro | 326225 | 324737 |
All tests were performed on a uom.general.4c16g VM with 4 vCPUs and 16384 MBs of RAM running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using Fio
Attached volume performance
On the new hypervisors, VMs with attached volumes can see increases in disk read performance of at least 2.1 times. Write speed, however, stays consistent between all test VMs.
| Type | Sequential Write (KB/s) | Sequential Read (KB/s) |
|---|---|---|
| MRC Premium | 773436 | 2224727 |
| MRC General | 812770 | 1877947 |
| NeCTAR melbourne-qh2 | 626984 | 865308 |
| NeCTAR Supermicro | 879892 | 641625 |
All tests were performed on a uom.general.4c16g VM with 4 vCPUs and 16384 MBs of RAM running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using Fio