LARGE FILES, SMALL WRITES, AND pNFS

Abstract

Workload characterization studies highlight the prevalence of small and sequential data requests in scientific applications. Parallel file systems excel at large data transfers but sometimes at the expense of small I/O performance. pNFS is an NFSv4.1 high-performance enhancement that provides direct storage access to parallel file systems while preserving NFSv4 operating system and hardware platform independence. This paper demonstrates that distributed file systems can increase write throughput to parallel data stores—regardless of file size—by overcoming parallel file system inefficiencies. We also show how pNFS can improve the overall write performance of parallel file systems by using direct, parallel I/O for large write requests and a distributed file system for small write requests. We describe our pNFS prototype and present experiments demonstrating the performance improvements.