As storage systems evolve, the block-based design of today's disks is becoming inadequate. As an alternative, objectbased storage devices (OSDs) offer a view where the disk manages data layout and keeps track of various attributes about data objects. By moving functionality that is traditionally the responsibility of the host OS to the disk, it is possible to improve overall performance and simplify management of a storage system. The capabilities of OSDs will also permit performance improvements in parallel file systems, such as further decoupling metadata operations and thus reducing metadata server bottlenecks.In this work we present an implementation of the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) integrated with a software emulator of an OSD and describe an infrastructure for client access. Even with the overhead of emulation, performance is comparable to a traditional server-fronted implementation, demonstrating that serverless parallel file systems using OSDs are an achievable goal.
As computing breaches petascale limits both in processor performance and storage capacity, the only way that current and future gains in performance can be achieved is by increasing the parallelism of the system. Gains in storage performance remain low due to the use of traditional distributed file systems such as NFS, where although multiple clients can access files at the same time, only one node can serve files to the clients. New file systems that distribute load across multiple data servers are being developed; however, most implementations concentrate all the metadata load at a single server still. Distributing metadata load is important to accommodate growing numbers of more powerful clients.Scaling metadata performance is more complex than scaling raw I/O performance, and with distributed metadata the complexity increases further. In this paper we present strategies for file creation in distributed metadata file systems. Using the PVFS distributed file system as our testbed, we present designs that are able to reduce the message complexity of the create operation and increase performance. Compared to the basecase create protocol implemented in PVFS, our design delivers near constant operation latency as the system scales, does not degenerate under high contention situations, and increases throughput linearly as the number of metadata servers increase. The design schemes are applicable to any distributed file system implementation.
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