Initial characterization of parallel NFS implementations

Weikuan Yu, Jeffrey S. Vetter

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Parallel NFS (pNFS) is touted as an emergent standard protocol for parallel I/O access in various storage environments. Several pNFS prototypes have been implemented for initial validation and protocol examination. Previous efforts have focused on realizing the pNFS protocol to expose the best bandwidth potential from underlying file and storage systems. In this presentation, we provide an initial characterization of two pNFS prototype implementations, lpNFS (a Lustre-based parallel NFS implementation) and spNFS (another reference implementation from Network Appliance, Inc.). We show that both lpNFS and spNFS can faithfully achieve the primary goal of pNFS, i.e., aggregating I/O bandwidth from many storage servers. However, they both face the challenge of scalable metadata management. Particularly, the throughput of sp- NFS metadata operations degrades significanlty with an increasing number of data servers. Even for the better-performing lpNFS, we discuss its architecture and propose a direct I/O request flow protocol to improve its performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010 - Atlanta, GA, United States
Duration: Apr 19 2010Apr 23 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010

Conference

Conference2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta, GA
Period04/19/1004/23/10

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