Performance Measurement of the Concurrent File System of the Intel iPSC/2 Hypercube

✍ Scribed by J.C. French; T.W. Pratt; M. Das

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 608 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1006/jpdc.1993.1009

✦ Synopsis

The Intel Concurrent File System (CFS) for the iPSC/2 and iPSC/860 hypercubes is one of the first production file systems to utilize the declustering of large files across numbers of disks to improve input/output (I/O) performance. The CFS also makes use of dedicated I/O nodes, operating asynchronously, which provide file caching and prefetching. Processing of (\mathrm{I} / \mathrm{O}) requests is distributed between the compute node that initiates the request and the I/O nodes that service the request. We present performance measurements of the CFS for an iPSC/2 hypercube with 32 compute nodes and (4 \mathrm{I} / 0) nodes (4 disks). Measurement of read/ write rates for one compute node to one (1 / O) node, one compute node to multiple I/O nodes, and multiple compute nodes to multiple (\mathrm{I} / \mathrm{O}) nodes form the basis for the study. Additional measurements show the effects of different buffer sizes, caching, prefetching, and file preallocation on system performance. A measure of (\mathrm{I} / \mathrm{O}) system imbalance is also introduced. Co 1993 Academic Press, Inc.