Search results for "File system"
showing 10 items of 31 documents
Direct lookup and hash-based metadata placement for local file systems
2013
New challenges to file systems' metadata performance are imposed by the continuously growing number of files existing in file systems. The total amount of metadata can become too big to be cached, potentially leading to multiple storage device accesses for a single metadata lookup operation. This paper takes a look at the limitations of traditional file system designs and discusses an alternative metadata handling approach, using hash-based concepts already established for metadata and data placement in distributed storage systems. Furthermore, a POSIX compliant prototype implementation based on these concepts is introduced and benchmarked. A variety of file system metadata and data operati…
MERCURY: A Transparent Guided I/O Framework for High Performance I/O Stacks
2017
The performance gap between processors and I/O represents a serious scalability limitation for applications running on computing clusters. Parallel file systems often provide mechanisms that allow programmers to disclose their I/O pattern knowledge to the lower layers of the I/O stack through a hints API. This information can be used by the file system to boost the application performance. Unfortunately, programmers rarely make use of these features, missing the opportunity to exploit the full potential of the storage system. In this paper we propose MERCURY, a transparent guided I/O framework able to optimize file I/O patterns in scientific applications, allowing users to control the I/O b…
ESB: Ext2 Split Block Device
2012
Solid State Disks (SSDs) start to replace rotating media (hard disks, HDD) in many areas, but are still not as cost efficient concerning capacity to completely replace them. One approach to use their superior performance properties is to use them as a cache for magnetic disks to speed up overall storage operations. In this paper, we present and evaluate a file system level optimization based on ext2. We split metadata and data and store the metadata on a SDD while the data remains on a common HDD. We evaluate our system with filebench under a file server, web server, and web proxy scenario and compare the results with flashcache. We find that many of the scenarios do not contain enough meta…
Kriterien für die Auswahl von Elektronischen Rechenanlagen für Biomedizinische Forschungsinstitute
1979
Computers are now a recognized tool in biomedical research. They are used for the evaluation of data on one hand and on the other hand for data acquisition and control of experiments. Based on our experience, some suggestions concerning the structure of a mini-computer system suitable for a research laboratory are made. According to the two major classes of application, two sets or requirements arise. We argue that it is effective to use this system for data reduction and evaluation because a large percentage of tasks require program development or at least specific input data handling. Therefore, we call for a multi-user time-sharing system which should be equipped with a set of commands t…
FADaC
2019
Solid state drives (SSDs) implement a log-structured write pattern, where obsolete data remains stored on flash pages until the flash translation layer (FTL) erases them. erase() operations, however, cannot erase a single page, but target entire flash blocks. Since these victim blocks typically store a mix of valid and obsolete pages, FTLs have to copy the valid data to a new block before issuing an erase() operation. This process therefore increases the latencies of concurrent I/Os and reduces the lifetime of flash memory. Data classification schemes identify data pages with similar update frequencies and group them together. FTLs can use this grouping to design garbage collection strategi…
An Analysis of Flash Page Reuse With WOM Codes
2018
Flash memory is prevalent in modern servers and devices. Coupled with the scaling down of flash technology, the popularity of flash memory motivates the search for methods to increase flash reliability and lifetime. Erasures are the dominant cause of flash cell wear, but reducing them is challenging because flash is a write-once medium— memory cells must be erased prior to writing. An approach that has recently received considerable attention relies on write-once memory (WOM) codes, designed to accommodate additional writes on write-once media. However, the techniques proposed for reusing flash pages with WOM codes are limited in their scope. Many focus on the coding theory alone, whereas o…
Improving MLC flash performance and endurance with extended P/E cycles
2015
The traditional usage pattern for NAND flash memory is the program/erase (P/E) cycle: the flash pages that make a flash block are all programmed in order and then the whole flash block needs to be erased before the pages can be programmed again. The erase operations are slow, wear out the medium, and require costly garbage collection procedures. Reducing their number is therefore beneficial both in terms of performance and endurance. The physical structure of flash cells limits the number of opportunities to overcome the 1 to 1 ratio between programming and erasing pages: a bit storing a logical 0 cannot be reprogrammed to a logical 1 before the end of the P/E cycle. This paper presents a t…
Extending SSD lifetime in database applications with page overwrites
2013
Flash-based Solid State Disks (SSDs) have been a great success story over the last years and are widely used in embedded systems, servers, and laptops.One often overlooked ability of NAND flash is that flash pages can be overwritten in certain circumstances. This can be used to decrease wear out and increase performance.In this paper, we analyze the potential of overwrites for the most used data structure in database applications: the B-Tree. We show that with overwrites it is possible to significantly reduce flash wear out and increase overall performance.
File system scalability with highly decentralized metadata on independent storage devices
2016
This paper discusses using hard drives that integrate a key-value interface and network access in the actual drive hardware (Kinetic storage platform) to supply file system functionality in a large scale environment. Taking advantage of higher-level functionality to handle metadata on the drives themselves, a serverless system architecture is proposed. Skipping path component traversal during the lookup operation is the key technique discussed in this paper to avoid performance degradation with highly decentralized metadata. Scalability implications are reviewed based on a fuse file system implementation. Peer Reviewed
GekkoFS — A Temporary Burst Buffer File System for HPC Applications
2020
Many scientific fields increasingly use high-performance computing (HPC) to process and analyze massive amounts of experimental data while storage systems in today’s HPC environments have to cope with new access patterns. These patterns include many metadata operations, small I/O requests, or randomized file I/O, while general-purpose parallel file systems have been optimized for sequential shared access to large files. Burst buffer file systems create a separate file system that applications can use to store temporary data. They aggregate node-local storage available within the compute nodes or use dedicated SSD clusters and offer a peak bandwidth higher than that of the backend parallel f…