Dynamical Re-striping Data on Storage Servers in Parallel File Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a mechanism for tracing I/O operations and their corresponding physical access on the storage servers in a parallel file system, then it guides data re-striping on the storage servers for handling complex physical access cases. To put this framework to work, we first figured out the way to map logical I/O operations on the client side to physical I/O access on the storage server side. We then developed a toolkit to generate I/O access patterns and their corresponding disk access. Finally, the information about both logical I/O access patterns and physical I/O access patterns can benefit to dynamical data re-striping and data pre-fetching on the storage servers for improving I/O performance. Experimental results show that the proposed data re-striping method by analyzing I/O access patterns and their associated disk access patterns can boost I/O data throughput significantly for applications with complicated access patterns. Especially, it work fairy well for the applications that deal with multi-dimension data sets across the fields of science, technology, education and business.