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flexFS

Performance

Aggregate Read Throughput

Section titled “Aggregate Read Throughput”

Aggregate read throughput is the key performance metric for I/O-bound data analysis clusters. The following chart compares flexFS against AWS EFS and FSx for Lustre across varying cluster sizes.

Aggregate read throughput comparison: flexFS vs EFS vs FSx for Lustre Aggregate read throughput comparison: flexFS vs EFS vs FSx for Lustre

Benchmark configuration:

  • Tool: DFS-Perf (similar results observed with alternative tools)
  • Workload: 64 threads per host, each concurrently reading 2 GiB files
  • FSx for Lustre: 12,000 GiB provisioned, 12,000 MiB/s throughput ($7,200/mo)
  • Instance type: AWS c6gn.16xlarge

Real-World Task: Bioinformatics

Section titled “Real-World Task: Bioinformatics”

To illustrate real-world performance, the following benchmark processes UK Biobank chromosome data — filtering and converting genetic data files using PLINK, a standard bioinformatics tool.

Wall clock time and computing cost for a bioinformatics task Wall clock time and computing cost for a bioinformatics task

While S3 offers economical storage, processing tasks against S3 data incurs higher execution time and computing expenses than against a POSIX filesystem, so total cost of ownership must account for both storage and compute.