Mechanisms of client-side caching on high performance computers

Abstract

With the continuous development of high-performance computing(HPC), I/O demand for high-performance computing applications is growing rapidly, and storage systems are under severe I/O pressure. In the file system client developed based on FUSE, VFS page cache and FUSE kernel became the important bottlenecks restricting system performance. Cache technology is a classic technology to alleviate the I/O bottleneck of HPC systems. This paper proposes a client-side caching mechanism that takes the advantage of high-performance computers supporting RDMA communication to improve the I/O performance of masFS client. Finally, we deployed and tested the improved file system client on the TH-1A system. The test results show that the client cache can significantly improve the application client I/O performance. For a single client, it increases both sequential read and write speed by a factor of 4.8 and 2.3.