Evaluation of parallel and distributed file system technologies for XSEDE

A long-running goal of XSEDE and other large-scale cyberinfrastructure efforts, including the NSF's earlier TeraGrid project, has been the deployment of wide-area file systems within large-scale grid contexts. These technologies, ideally, combine the accessibility of local resources with the scale and diversity of national-scale cyberinfrastructure, and several deployments of such file systems have been successful, including the GPFS-WAN file system deployed at SDSC and the Data Capacitor-WAN file system deployed at Indiana University. In the XSEDE project a major data services area task is to deploy a single XSEDE-Wide File System to be available from all tier 1 service providers as well as major campus partners of XSEDE. In preparation for this deployment an XWFS evaluation process has been undertaken to determine the most appropriate technology to meet the technical and other requirements of the XSEDE community. GPFS, Lustre, and SLASH2, all technologies that have been used in wide-area network contexts for previous projects, were selected for intensive evaluation, and NFS was also examined for use in combination with these underlying file system technologies for use in overcoming platform compatibility issues. This presentation will describe the process and outcomes of the XSEDE-Wide File System evaluation effort, including a detailed discussion of the requirements development and evaluation process, benchmark development and test system deployment. We will also discuss additional factors that were determined to be relevant to the selection of a file system technology for widespread deployment in XSEDE, such as the robustness of documentation and the size and sophistication of the user community, as well as similar deployments in other large-scale cyberinfrastructure projects. Next steps for the XWFS effort will also be discussed in the context of the overall XSEDE systems engineering process.