IBRIX File System: Architecture and Design

Abstract

Summary form only given. Recently, there have been significant advances in file system technology in the form of cluster, distributed and/or parallel file systems in an attempt to break the I/O bottleneck plaguing the effective utilization of clusters of commodity computers. Successes have been achieved in scaling performance when defined as bandwidth, as typified by sequential access of large files using large I/O sizes. Applications with such access patterns does not represent all application classes to which cluster computing is being applied as a potential solution, the balance being those that access small and medium sized files in a random or sequential manner using small I/O sizes. Specifically, these access patterns perform as many and often more "metadata" operations on the file system as data reads or writes. Since metadata operations are at the heart of a file system and impact its integrity, scaling throughput or metadata performance through concurrency across many servers poses the most difficult technical challenge in file system design. This poster will present details about the fundamentally new architecture for constructing parallel file systems called segmented file system that scales linearly for both data and metadata oriented applications. Performance results will be presented with the IBRIX Fusion product (http:Wwww.ibrix.com) based on this architecture using micro benchmarks as well as real applications demonstrating the general-purpose scalability of this architecture. The poster will also show typical I/O cluster offerings from Dell that use IBRIX, using large cluster installations at universities and research labs as an example