Designing a high-performance clustered NAS: a case study with pNFS over RDMA on InfiniBand

Authors:
Ranjit Noronha;Xiangyong Ouyang;Dhabaleswar K. Panda
Affiliations:
Network Based Computing Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH;Network Based Computing Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH;Network Based Computing Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Venue:
HiPC'08 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on High performance computing
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Large scale scientific and commercial applications consume and producepetabytes of data. This data needs to be safely stored, cataloged and reproducedwith high-performance. The current generation of single headed NAS(Network Attached Storage) based systems such as NFS is not able to provide anacceptable level of performance to these types of demanding applications. ClusteredNAS have evolved to meet the storage demands of these demanding applications.However, the performance of these Clustered NAS solutions is limited bythe communication protocol being used, usually TCP/IP. In this paper, we propose,design and evaluate a clustered NAS; pNFS over RDMA on InfiniBand. Our resultsshow that for a sequential workload on 8 data servers, the pNFS over RDMAdesign can achieve a peak aggregate Read throughput of up to 5,029 MB/s, a maximumimprovement of 188% over the TCP/IP transport and a Write throughput of1,872 MB/s; a maximum improvement of 150% over the corresponding TCP/IPtransport throughput. Evaluations with other type of workloads and traces showan improvement in performance of up to 27%. Finally, our design of pNFS overRDMA improves the performance of BTIO relative to the Lustre file system.