by P. Carns et al., Linux Conference 2000.
Abstract:
As Linux clusters have matured as platforms for low- cost, high-performance parallel computing, software packages to provide many key services have emerged, especially in areas such as message passing and net- working. One area devoid of support, however, has been parallel file systems, which are critical for high- performance I/O on such clusters. We have developed a parallel file system for Linux clusters, called the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS). PVFS is intended both as a high-performance parallel file system that anyone can download and use and as a tool for pursuing further re- search in parallel I/O and parallel file systems for Linux clusters.
In this paper, we describe the design and implementa- tion of PVFS and present performance results on the Chiba City cluster at Argonne. We provide performance results for a workload of concurrent reads and writes for various numbers of compute nodes, I/O nodes, and I/O request sizes. We also present performance results for MPI-IO on PVFS, both for a concurrent read/write workload and for the BTIO benchmark. We compare the I/O performance when using a Myrinet network versus a fast-ethernet network for I/O-related communication in PVFS. We obtained read and write bandwidths as high as 700 Mbytes/sec with Myrinet and 225 Mbytes/sec with fast ethernet.
As Linux clusters have matured as platforms for low- cost, high-performance parallel computing, software packages to provide many key services have emerged, especially in areas such as message passing and net- working. One area devoid of support, however, has been parallel file systems, which are critical for high- performance I/O on such clusters. We have developed a parallel file system for Linux clusters, called the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS). PVFS is intended both as a high-performance parallel file system that anyone can download and use and as a tool for pursuing further re- search in parallel I/O and parallel file systems for Linux clusters.
In this paper, we describe the design and implementa- tion of PVFS and present performance results on the Chiba City cluster at Argonne. We provide performance results for a workload of concurrent reads and writes for various numbers of compute nodes, I/O nodes, and I/O request sizes. We also present performance results for MPI-IO on PVFS, both for a concurrent read/write workload and for the BTIO benchmark. We compare the I/O performance when using a Myrinet network versus a fast-ethernet network for I/O-related communication in PVFS. We obtained read and write bandwidths as high as 700 Mbytes/sec with Myrinet and 225 Mbytes/sec with fast ethernet.
Link to the full paper:
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/tkosar/cse710_spring13/papers/pvfs.pdf
