Effective metadata management in exascale file system

Abstract

This paper presents an effective method of managing metadata in exascale file systems. In order to store exponentially growing numbers of files, numerous methods for distributing and managing metadata have been suggested and developed. However, these methods have not provided an appropriate solution for managing a very large amount of metadata because they do not overcome two significant challenges in exascale file systems: (1) nonlinear performance scalability and (2) performance degradation over time. We propose an effective metadata management model and high-performance metadata management system that not only overcome these limitations but also provide a foundation for managing exascale metadata in a distributed file system. The resulting implementation of our metadata management system is the core of EEFS, an exascale distributed file system by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. The evaluation results show that the critical challenges of existing metadata management technologies are overcome and particularly that the performance is not degraded even when the amount of accumulated metadata increases with time.