GekkoFS — A Temporary Burst Buffer File System for HPC Applications

Vef, Marc-André; Moti, Nafiseh; Süß, Tim; Tacke, M.; Tocci, Tommaso; Nou, Ramón; Miranda, Alberto; Cortés, Toni; Brinkmann, André

doi:10.1007/s11390-020-9797-6

Cited by 30 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This requires either an application-specific data management implementation, or the addition of a system software layer that manages the data and presents it to the application. One such software layer is GekkoFS [7,8] , an ephemeral file system that is created just-in-time for individual jobs, and that sits on top of the B-APM working across nodes. GekkoFS is ephemeral because it is only live for the duration of a job, and it therefore also needs the ability to move the data into, and out of, B-APM.…”

Section: B-apm As a Distributed File Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One such software layer is GekkoFS [7] [8], an ephemeral file system that is created just-in-time for individual jobs, and that sits on top of the B-APM working across nodes. GekkoFS is ephemeral because it is only live for the duration of a job, and it therefore also needs the ability to move data into, and out of, B-APM.…”

Section: B-apm As a Distributed File Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Usage Scenarios for Byte-Addressable Persistent Memory in High-Performance and Data Intensive Computing

Weiland¹,

Homölle²

2021

J. Comput. Sci. Technol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Byte-addressable persistent memory (B-APM) presents a new opportunity to bridge the performance gap between main memory and storage. In this paper, we present the usage scenarios for this new technology, based on the capabilities of Intel's DCPMM. We outline some of the basic performance characteristics of DCPMM, and explain how it can be configured and used to address the needs of memory and I/O intensive applications in the HPC (high-performance computing) and data intensive domains. Two decision trees are presented to advise on the configuration options for B-APM; their use is illustrated with two examples. We show that the flexibility of the technology has the potential to be truly disruptive, not only because of the performance improvements it can deliver, but also because it allows systems to cater for wider range of applications on homogeneous hardware.

show abstract

Section: B-apm As a Distributed File Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B-apm As a Distributed File Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Usage Scenarios for Byte-Addressable Persistent Memory in High-Performance and Data Intensive Computing

Weiland¹,

Homölle²

2021

J. Comput. Sci. Technol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Therefore, we propose a fullfledged user-level I/O forwarding solution that is adequate and easy to run in production machines. To achieve this goal, we enriched an existing ad-hoc file system called GekkoFS [12], [13] with a forwarding mode. GekkoFS creates a temporary file system on compute nodes using their local storage capacity as a burst-buffer to alleviate I/O peaks.…”

Section: Gekkofwd: On-demand I/o Forwardingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arbitration Policies for On-Demand User-Level I/O Forwarding on HPC Platforms

Bez

Miranda

Nou

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

I/O forwarding is a well-established and widelyadopted technique in HPC to reduce contention in the access to storage servers and transparently improve I/O performance. Rather than having applications directly accessing the shared parallel file system, the forwarding technique defines a set of I/O nodes responsible for receiving application requests and forwarding them to the file system, thus reshaping the flow of requests. The typical approach is to statically assign I/O nodes to applications depending on the number of compute nodes they use, which is not always necessarily related to their I/O requirements. Thus, this approach leads to inefficient usage of these resources. This paper investigates arbitration policies based on the applications I/O demands, represented by their access patterns. We propose a policy based on the Multiple-Choice Knapsack problem that seeks to maximize global bandwidth by giving more I/O nodes to applications that will benefit the most. Furthermore, we propose a userlevel I/O forwarding solution as an on-demand service capable of applying different allocation policies at runtime for machines where this layer is not present. We demonstrate our approach's applicability through extensive experimentation and show it can transparently improve global I/O bandwidth by up to 85% in a live setup compared to the default static policy.

show abstract

“…A relevant discussion and in-depth analysis on ephemeral systems has already been done by Brinkmann et al [5]; that article discusses the general ideas of ad-hoc file systems as well as the specific characteristics of three implementations: BeeOND [13], GekkoFS [37], and BurstFS [39].…”

Section: Ephemeral Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Active Object Stores: Bringing Data Locality to the Limit With NVM

Barceló,

Queralt,

Cortes

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Object stores are widely used software stacks that achieve excellent scale-out with a well-defined interface and robust performance. However, their traditional get/put interface is unable to exploit data locality at its fullest, and limits reaching its peak performance. In particular, there is one way to improve data locality that has not yet achieved mainstream adoption: the active object store. Although there are some projects that have implemented the main idea of the active object store such as Swift's Storlets or Ceph Object Classes, the scope of these implementations is limited.We believe that there is a huge potential for active object stores in the current status quo. Hyper-converged nodes are bringing more computing capabilities to storage nodes -and viceversa. The proliferation of non-volatile memory (NVM) technology is blurring the line between system memory (fast and scarce) and block devices (slow and abundant). More and more applications need to manage a sheer amount of data (data analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning & AI, etc.), demanding bigger clusters and more complex computations. All these elements are potential game changers that need to be evaluated in the scope of active object stores.More specifically, having NVM devices presents additional opportunities, such as in-place execution. Being able to use the NVM from within the storage system while taking advantage of in-place execution (thanks to the byte-addressable nature of the NVM), in conjunction with the computing capabilities of hyper-converged nodes, can lead to active object stores that greatly outperform their non-active counterparts.In this article we propose an active object store software stack and evaluate it on an NVM-populated node. We will show how this setup is able to reduce execution times from 10% up to more than 90% in a variety of representative application scenarios. Our discussion will focus on the active aspect of the system as well as on the implications of the memory configuration.

show abstract

GekkoFS — A Temporary Burst Buffer File System for HPC Applications

Cited by 30 publications

References 31 publications

Usage Scenarios for Byte-Addressable Persistent Memory in High-Performance and Data Intensive Computing

Usage Scenarios for Byte-Addressable Persistent Memory in High-Performance and Data Intensive Computing

Arbitration Policies for On-Demand User-Level I/O Forwarding on HPC Platforms

Revisiting Active Object Stores: Bringing Data Locality to the Limit With NVM

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About