NPAC Technical Report SCCS-433
Performance Evaluation of Concurrent File System on Touchstone Delta
Rajesh Bordawekar, Alok Choudhary
Abstract
For a high-performance parallel machine to be a scalable
system, it must also have a scalable parallel I/O system.
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Intel
Touchstone Delta's Concurrent File System (CFS).
The main objective of the study is to determine
the maximum file read/write rates for various configurations of I/O and
compute nodes. In addition, we study the effects of file access modes,
buffer sizes and file sizes on the system performance. In most cases, the
result shows that performance of CFS scales as the number of disks is
increased, but the sustained performance improvements are much lower than
the system's peak capacity. We observe that the performance of CFS
scales with the number of processors in the beginning, however, a plateu a
quickly reached due to the I/O system bottleneck and enormous software
overhead, especially that of synchronization. Finally we also show that the
performance of the CFS can greatly vary for various data distributions
commonly employed in scientific and engineering applications.