Handling Heterogeneity in Shared-Disk File Systems

13 years 9 months ago

Download hssl.cs.jhu.edu

We develop and evaluate a system for load management in shared-disk ﬁle systems built on clusters of heterogeneous computers. The system generalizes load balancing and server provisioning. It balances ﬁle metadata workload by moving ﬁle sets among cluster server nodes. It also responds to changing server resources that arise from failure and recovery and dynamically adding or removing servers. The system is adaptive and self-managing. It operates without any a-priori knowledge of workload properties or the capabilities of the servers. Rather, it continuously tunes load placement using a technique called adaptive, non-uniform (ANU) randomization. ANU randomization realizes the scalability and metadata reduction beneﬁts of hash-based, randomized placement techniques. It also avoids hashing’s drawbacks: load skew, inability to cope with heterogeneity, and lack of tunability. Simulation results show that our load-management algorithm performs comparably to a prescient algorithm....

Changxun Wu, Randal C. Burns

Real-time Traffic