Metaserver Locality and Scalability in a Distributed NFS
Everton Hermann (Instituto de Informática/UFRGS)Rafael Ávila (Instituto de Informática/UFRGS)
Philippe Navaux (Instituto de Informática/UFRGS)
Yves Denneulin (Laboratoire ID/IMAG)
Abstract:
The leveraging of existing storage space in a cluster is a desirable characteristic of a parallel file system. While undoubtedly an advantage from the point of view of resource management, this possibility may face the administrator with a wide variety of alternatives for configuring the file server, whose optimal layout is not always easy to devise. Given the diversity of parameters such as the number of processors on each node and the capacity and topology of the network, decisions regarding the locality of server components like metadata servers and I/O servers have a direct impact on performance and scalability. In this paper, we explore the capabilities of the dNFSp file system on a large cluster installation, observing how scalable the system behaves in different scenarios and comparing it to a dedicated parallel file system. Our obtained results show that the design of dNFSp allows for a scalable and resource-saving configuration for clusters with a large number of nodes.
Keywords:
Cluster and Grid Computing, Parallel and Distributed Computing, Parallel I/O
