On the performance of the POSIX I/O interface to PVFS

Murali Vilayannur, Robert B. Ross, Philip H. Carns, Rajeev Thakur, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Mahmut Kandemir

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

The ever-increasing gap in performance between CPU/memory technologies and the I/O subsystem (disks, I/O buses) in modern workstations has exacerbated the I/O bottlenecks inherent in applications that access large disk resident data sets. A common technique to alleviate the I/O bottlenecks on clusters of work-stations, is the use of parallel file systems. One such parallel file system is the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), which is a freely available tool to achieve high-performance I/O on Linux-based clusters. In this paper, we describe the performance and scalability of the UNIX I/O interface to PVFS. To illustrate the performance, we present experimental results using Bonnie++, a commonly used file system benchmark to test file system throughput; a synthetic parallel I/O application for calculating aggregate read and write bandwidths; and a synthetic benchmark which calculates the time taken to untar the Linux kernel source tree to measure performance of a large number of small file operations. We obtained aggregate read and write bandwidths as high as 550 MB/s with a Myrinet-based network and 160MB/S with fast Ethernet.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 12th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Proceedings, PDP 2004
Pages332-339
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
EventProceedings - 12th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Proceedings, PDP 2004 - A Coruna, Spain
Duration: Feb 11 2004Feb 13 2004

Publication series

NameProceedings - Euromicro Conference on Parellel, Distribeted and Network-based Proceeding

Other

OtherProceedings - 12th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Proceedings, PDP 2004
Country/TerritorySpain
CityA Coruna
Period2/11/042/13/04

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Engineering(all)

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