Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/1183401.1183419acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Large files, small writes, and pNFS

Published: 28 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Workload characterization studies highlight the prevalence of small and sequential data requests in scientific applications. Parallel file systems excel at large data transfers but sometimes at the expense of small I/O performance. pNFS is an NFSv4.1 high-performance enhancement that provides direct storage access to parallel file systems while preserving NFSv4 operating system and hardware platform independence. This paper demonstrates that distributed file systems can increase write throughput to parallel data stores---regardless of file size---by overcoming parallel file system inefficiencies. We also show how pNFS can improve the overall write performance of parallel file systems by using direct, parallel I/O for large write requests and a distributed file system for small write requests. We describe our pNFS prototype and present experiments demonstrating the performance improvements.

References

[1]
Cluster File Systems Inc., "Lustre: A Scalable, High-Performance File System," 2002.]]
[2]
PVFS2 Development Team, "Parallel Virtual File System, Version 2," www.pvfs.org/pvfs2.]]
[3]
F. Schmuck and R. Haskin, "GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters," in Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2002.]]
[4]
Panasas Inc., "Panasas ActiveScale File System Datasheet," www.panasas.com, 2003.]]
[5]
D. Kotz and N. Nieuwejaar, "Dynamic File-Access Characteristics of a Production Parallel Scientific Workload," in Proceedings of Supercomputing '94, 1994.]]
[6]
A. Purakayastha, C. Schlatter Ellis, D. Kotz, N. Nieuwejaar, and M. Best, "Characterizing Parallel File-Access Patterns on a Large-Scale Multiprocessor," in Proceedings of the Ninth International Parallel Processing Symposium, 1995.]]
[7]
N. Nieuwejaar, D. Kotz, A. Purakayastha, C. Schlatter Ellis, and M. Best, "File-Access Characteristics of Parallel Scientific Workloads," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, (7)10, pp. 1075--1089, 1996.]]
[8]
E. Smirni and D. A. Reed, "Workload Characterization of Input/Output Intensive Parallel Applications," in Proceedings of the Conference on Modeling Techniques and Tools for Computer Performance Evaluation, 1997.]]
[9]
E. Smirni, R. A. Aydt, A. A. Chien, and D. A. Reed, "I/O Requirements of Scientific Applications: An Evolutionary View," in Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Conference on High Performance Distributed Computing, 1996.]]
[10]
P. E. Crandall, R. A. Aydt, A. A. Chien, and D. A. Reed, "Input/Output Characteristics of Scalable Parallel Applications," in Proceedings of Supercomputing '95, 1995.]]
[11]
F. Wang, Q. Xin, B. Hong, S. A. Brandt, E. L. Miller, and D. D. E Long, "File System Workload Analysis For Large Scale Scientific Computing Applications," in Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/12th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, 2004.]]
[12]
ASCI Purple RFP, www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/purple/rfp.]]
[13]
R. Rew and G. Davis, "The Unidata netCDF: Software for Scientific Data Access," in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Interactive Information and Processing Systems for Meteorology, Oceanography and Hydrology, Anaheim, CA, 1990.]]
[14]
NCSA, "HDF5", hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5.]]
[15]
Sun Microsystems Inc., "NFS: Network File System Protocol Specification," RFC 1094, 1989.]]
[16]
Common Internet File System File Access Protocol, msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cifs/protocol/cifs.asp.]]
[17]
M. G. Baker, J. H. Hartman, M. D. Kupfer, K. W. Shirriff, and J. K. Ousterhout, "Measurements of a Distributed File System," in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 1991.]]
[18]
S. Shepler, B. Callaghan, D. Robinson, R. Thurlow, C. Beame, M. Eisler, and D. Noveck, "Network File System Version 4 Protocol Specification," RFC 3530, 2003.]]
[19]
B. Welch, B. Halevy, D. Black, A. Adamson, and D. Noveck, "pNFS Operations Summary," Internet Draft, draft-welch-pnfs-ops-00.txt, 2004.]]
[20]
G. Gibson, B. Welch, G. Goodson, and P. Corbett, "Parallel NFS Requirements and Design Considerations," Internet Draft, draft-gibson-pnfs-reqs-00.txt, 2004.]]
[21]
D. Hildebrand and P. Honeyman, "Exporting Storage Systems in a Scalable Manner with pNFS," in Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE - 13th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, Monterey, CA, 2005.]]
[22]
M. Rosenblum and J. K. Ousterhout, "The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, (10)1, pp. 26--52, 1992.]]
[23]
J. H. Hartman and J. K. Ousterhout, "The Zebra Striped Network File System," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, (13)3, 1995.]]
[24]
P. F. Corbett and D. G. Feitelson, "The Vesta Parallel File System," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, (14)3, pp. 225--264, 1996.]]
[25]
EMC Celerra HighRoad Whitepaper, www.emc.com, 2001.]]
[26]
A. L. Drapeau, K. Shirriff, E. K. Lee, J. H. Hartman, E. L. Miller, S. Seshan, R. H. Katz, K. Lutz, D. A. Patterson, P. H. Chen, and G. A. Gibson, "RAID-II: A High-Bandwidth Network File Server," in Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 1994.]]
[27]
W. Gropp, S. Huss-Lederman, A. Lumsdaine, E. Lusk, B. Nitzberg, W. Saphir, and M. Snir, MPI: The Complete Reference, volume 2--The MPI-2 Extensions. Cambridge, MA, 1998.]]
[28]
R. Thakur, W. Gropp, and E. Lusk, "Data Sieving and Collective I/O in ROMIO," in Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, 1999.]]
[29]
J. Satran, D. Smith, K. Meth, O. Biran, J. Hafner, C. Sapuntzakis, M. Bakke, M. Wakeley, L. Dalle Ore, P. Von Stamwitz, R. Haagens, M. Chadalapaka, E. Zeidner, and Y. Klein, "iSCSI," Internet Draft, draft-ietf-ips-iscsi-08.txt, 2001.]]
[30]
R. Brightwell, A. B. Maccabe, R. Riesen, and T. Hudson, "The Portals 3.3 Message Passing Interface," 2003.]]
[31]
R. Srinivasan, "RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol Specification Version 2," RFC 1831, 1995.]]
[32]
Unidata Program Center, "Where is NetCDF Used?," www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/usage.html.]]
[33]
J. Katcher, "PostMark: A New File System Benchmark," Technical Report TR3022, Network Appliance, 1997.]]
[34]
IOR Benchmark, www.llnl.gov/asci/purple/benchmarks/limited/ior.]]
[35]
W. D. Norcott and D. Capps, "IOZone Filesystem Benchmark," 2003.]]
[36]
FLASH I/O Benchmark, flash.uchicago.edu/~jbgallag/io_bench.]]
[37]
ATLAS, atlasinfo.cern.ch.]]
[38]
The Large Hadron Collider, lhc.web.cern.ch.]]

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Large files, small writes, and pNFS

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICS '06: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Supercomputing
    June 2006
    385 pages
    ISBN:1595932828
    DOI:10.1145/1183401
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 28 June 2006

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. NFSv4
    2. distributed file system
    3. pNFS
    4. parallel I/O
    5. parallel file system
    6. small write performance improvement

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    ICS06
    Sponsor:
    ICS06: International Conference on Supercomputing 2006
    June 28 - July 1, 2006
    Queensland, Cairns, Australia

    Acceptance Rates

    ICS '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 37 of 141 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 629 of 2,180 submissions, 29%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)6
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 13 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2015)Z-MAPACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/262966311:1(1-33)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2015
    • (2014)CBM: A cooperative buffer management for SSD2014 30th Symposium on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST)10.1109/MSST.2014.6855545(1-12)Online publication date: Jun-2014
    • (2013)Improving Bandwidth Efficiency for Consistent Multistream StorageACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/2435204.24352069:1(1-27)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2013
    • (2013)An analysis of replication and retrieval of medical image data using a database management system and a distributed file system2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)10.1109/ISCC.2013.6755049(000814-000819)Online publication date: Jul-2013
    • (2013)tpNFSProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 27th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing Workshops and PhD Forum10.1109/IPDPSW.2013.36(1989-1996)Online publication date: 20-May-2013
    • (2013)RTRM: A Response Time-Based Replica Management Strategy for Cloud Storage SystemGrid and Pervasive Computing10.1007/978-3-642-38027-3_13(124-133)Online publication date: 2013
    • (2012)Towards Dynamic Scripted pNFS LayoutsProceedings of the 2012 SC Companion: High Performance Computing, Networking Storage and Analysis10.1109/SC.Companion.2012.13(13-17)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2012
    • (2011)Turning the tide of the data delugeProceedings of the first annual workshop on High performance computing meets databases10.1145/2125636.2125644(21-24)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2011
    • (2011)Design and implementation of parallel file aggregation mechanismProceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers10.1145/1988796.1988802(33-40)Online publication date: 31-May-2011
    • (2011)Small Files Problem in Parallel File SystemProceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Network Computing and Information Security - Volume 0210.1109/NCIS.2011.143(227-232)Online publication date: 14-May-2011
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media