GIGA+: scalable directories for shared file systems
PDSW '07 Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Petascale data storage: held in conjunction with Supercomputing '07
Scalable massively parallel I/O to task-local files
Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis
Black-box problem diagnosis in parallel file systems
FAST'10 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on File and storage technologies
CEFLS: A Cost-Effective File Lookup Service in a Distributed Metadata File System
CCGRID '12 Proceedings of the 2012 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (ccgrid 2012)
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond
Metadata Traces and Workload Models for Evaluating Big Storage Systems
UCC '12 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing
Design of an active storage cluster file system for DAG workflows
DISCS-2013 Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Systems
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Large HPC installations typically make use of parallel file systems that adhere to POSIX I/O conventions, and that implement a separation of data and metadata in order to maintain high performance. File systems such as GPFS and Lustre have evolved to enable an increase in data bandwidth that is primarily achieved by adding more disk drives behind an increasing number of disk controllers. Improvements in metadata performance cannot be achieved by just deploying a large volume of hardware, as the defining characteristics are the number of simultaneous operations that can be carried out and the latency of those operations. For highly scalable applications using parallel I/O libraries, the speed of metadata operations, such as opening a file on thousands of processes, has the potential to become the major bottleneck to improved I/O performance. This Metadata Wall has the ability to grow such that metadata operations can take much longer than the subsequent data operations, even on systems with very large amounts of I/O data bandwidth. We present results showing the performance of metadata operations with standard disk equipment and with solid state storage hardware, and extrapolate whether we expect the evolution in hardware alone will be sufficient to limit the effects of this I/O Metadata Wall. We also report challenges in making the metadata I/O measurements and subsequent analysis for parallel file systems.