NPAC Technical Report SCCS-420
An Experimental Performance Evaluation of Touchstone Delta Concurrent File System
Rajesh Bordawekar, Alok Choudhary, JuanMiguel delRosario
Submitted December 07 1992
Abstract
For a high-performance parallel machine to be truly a scalable
system, it must have a scalable parallel I/O system. recently, several
commercial machines (e.g. Intel Touchstone Delta, Paragon, CM-5,
Ncube-2) have been built that provide features for parallel
I/O. However, very little is understood about the performance of these
I/O systems. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the
Intel Touchstone Delta's
Concurrent File System (CFS). The CFS
utilizes the declustering of large files across the disks to improve
the I/O performance.
Data files can be read or written on the CFS using 4 access
modes. The disks on which data is stored can be varied from 1 to
64. We present performance measurements for the CFS on the
Touchstone Delta with 512 compute nodes and 32 I/O nodes. The study
focuses on file read/write rates for various configurations of
I/O and compute nodes. The study attempts to show the effect of access
modes,buffer
sizes and volume restrictions on system performance. The paper also
shows that the performance of the CFS can greatly vary for various
data distributions commonly employed in scientific and engineering
applications.