TY - GEN
T1 - Initial characterization of parallel NFS implementations
AU - Yu, Weikuan
AU - Vetter, Jeffrey S.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77954062011&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IPDPSW.2010.5470716
DO - 10.1109/IPDPSW.2010.5470716
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:77954062011
SN - 9781424465347
T3 - Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010
BT - Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010
T2 - 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum, IPDPSW 2010
Y2 - 19 April 2010 through 23 April 2010
ER -