Performance of the Galley Parallel File System
Nils Nieuwejaar, David Kotz
Dartmouth College
Abstract:
As the I/O needs of parallel scientific applications increase, file
systems for multiprocessors are being designed to provide applications
with parallel access to multiple disks. Many parallel file systems
present applications with a conventional Unix-like interface that
allows the application to access multiple disks transparently. This
interface conceals the parallelism within the file system, which
increases the ease of programmability, but makes it difficult or
impossible for sophisticated programmers and libraries to use knowledge
about their I/O needs to exploit that parallelism. Furthermore, most
current parallel file systems are optimized for a different workload
than they are being asked to support. We introduce Galley, a new
parallel file system that is intended to efficiently support realistic
parallel workloads. Initial experiments, reported in this paper,
indicate that Galley is capable of providing high-performance I/O to
applications that access data in patterns that have been observed to be
common.
David Kotz --
Last modified: Wed Jan 31 12:07:34 1996