Scheduling for improved write performance in a Cost-Effective, Fault-Tolerant Parallel Virtual File System (CEFT-PVFS). Yifeng Zhu, Hong Jiang, Xiao Qin, Dan Feng, and David Swanson. In Proceedings of The 4th LCI International Conference on Linux Clusters: The HPC Revolution 2003, June 24-26, 2003, San Jose, California.

Abstract
Without any additional hardware, CEFT-PVFS utilizes the existing disks on each cluster node to provide RAID-10 style parallel I/O service. In CEFT-PVFS, all servers are also computational nodes and can be heavily loaded by different applications running on the cluster, thus potentially degrading the I/O performance. To minimize the degradation, I/O requests can be scheduled on a less loaded server in each mirroring pair. To help define the meaning of “load” in face of multiple resources such as CPU, memory, disk and network, this paper examines the impacts of these resources by measuring aggregate I/O throughput of the simplest CEFT-PVFS configurations, under specific and isolated workload stresses. Based on the heuristic rules found from the experimental results, a scheduling algorithm for dynamic load balancing is de-veloped. In a CEFF-PVFS with 16 data servers, we evaluate this algorithm un-der different workloads. The results show that the proposed scheduling algo-rithm significantly improves the overall performance.

BibTeX Entry
  @InProceedings{yzhu:cwce03,
author = "Yifeng Zhu and Hong Jiang and Xiao Qin and Dan Feng and David Swanson",
title = "Scheduling for Improved Write Performance in a Cost-Effective, Fault-Tolerant Parallel Virtual File System ({CEFT-PVFS})",
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 4th {LCI} International Conference on {Linux} Clusters: The {HPC}Revolution 2003},
location = "San Jose, California",
year = "2003",
month = jun
}

Full Paper
 
Last modified on October 16, 2003