Exploiting redundancy to boost performance in a RAID-10 style cluster-based file system

  • Authors:

  • Yifeng Zhu;Hong Jiang;Xiao Qin;Dan Feng;David R. Swanson

  • Affiliations:

  • Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, USA 04469;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA 68588;Department of Computer Science, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Mexico, USA 87801;Department of Computer Science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA 68588

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

While aggregating the throughput of existing disks on cluster nodes is a cost-effective approach to alleviate the I/O bottleneck in cluster computing, this approach suffers from potential performance degradations due to contentions for shared resources on the same node between storage data processing and user task computation. This paper proposes to judiciously utilize the storage redundancy in the form of mirroring existed in a RAID-10 style file system to alleviate this performance degradation. More specifically, a heuristic scheduling algorithm is developed, motivated from the observations of a simple cluster configuration, to spatially schedule write operations on the nodes with less load among each mirroring pair. The duplication of modified data to the mirroring nodes is performed asynchronously in the background. The read performance is improved by two techniques: doubling the degree of parallelism and hot-spot skipping. A synthetic benchmark is used to evaluate these algorithms in a real cluster environment and the proposed algorithms are shown to be very effective in performance enhancement.