MRC General 2020 Hardware Refresh

The team at the Melbourne Research Cloud (MRC) is excited to announce that we have launched 11,264 virtual cores in our data centre to replace 9,600 virtual cores in MRC General hypervisors that has reached end-of-life. This hardware replacement is made possible by the University of Melbourne Petascale Campus Initiative.

Our fleet of replacement hypervisors are built on AMD EPYC 2 with a base CPU clock speed of 2.0Ghz and can be bursted to 3.35Ghz, offering significant performance to the outgoing Intel Xeon 2.3Ghz.

CPU performance

The AMD hypervisors offer 21% improvement over the EOL hypervisors using Ubuntu 18.04. On Ubuntu 20.04, which on kernel 5.x and able to take full advantage of the AMD Zen architecture, the performance gain is as much as 37%. The new hypervisors also offer up to 7% performance gain to the premium MRC Hicores partition.

Type	Score
MRC AMD on Ubuntu 18.04	92935
MRC AMD on Ubuntu 20.04	99612
MRC EOL on Ubuntu 18.04	76476
MRC EOL on Ubuntu 20.04	72685
MRC Hicores on Ubuntu 18.04	92814
MRC Hicores on Ubuntu 20.04	93221

All CPU Benchmark is run on uom.general.4c16g VM running Ubuntu with 4 vCPUs and 16 GBs RAM using CoreMark

Disk performance

In term of root disk performance, the AMD hypervisors offer around 15% improvement over the MRC General EOL and MRC Hicores.

Type	Sequential Write (KB/s)	Sequential Read (KB/s)
MRC AMD	774583	2509948
MRC EOL	675380	2296592
MRC Hicores	674798	2010536

All tests were performed on a uom.general.4c16g VM with 4 vCPUs and 16 GBs of RAM running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using Fio. Due of the nature of networked storage, performance metric might fluctuate based on network traffics.

Attached volume performance

On the new hypervisors, VMs with attached volumes can see an average increases disk write performance from 20%-25% and read performance from 30%-45%.

Type	Sequential Write (KB/s)	Sequential Read (KB/s)
MRC AMD	827368	2971931
MRC EOL	762516	1877947
MRC Hicores	574544	2224727