Improved Read Performance in a Cost-Effective, Fault-Tolerant Parallel Virtual File System (CEFT-PVFS)

Due to the ever-widening performance gap between processors and disks, I/O operations tend to become the major performance bottleneck of data-intensive applications on modern clusters. If all the existing disks on the nodes of a cluster are connected together to establish high performance parallel storage systems, the cluster’s overall performance can be boosted at no additional cost. CEFT-PVFS (a RAID 10 style parallel file system that extends the original PVFS), as one such system, divides the cluster nodes into two groups, stripes the data across one group in a round-robin fashion, and then duplicates the same data to the other group to provide storage service of high performance and high reliability. Previous research has shown that the system reliability is improved by a factor of more than 40 with mirroring while maintaining a comparable write performance. This paper presents another benefit of CEFT-PVFS in which the aggregate peak read performance can be improved by as much a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Yifeng Zhu, Hong Jiang, Xiao Qin, Dan Feng, David R. Swanson
• Keywords: CCGRID 2003, Cluster Computing, Cluster’s Overall Performance, Original Pvfs, Performance