Leveraging OSD+ devices for implementing a high‐throughput parallel file system

Abstract

OSD+s are enhanced object-based storage devices (OSDs) able to deal with both data and metadata operations via data and directory objects, respectively. So far, we have focused on designing and implementing efficient directory objects in OSD+s. This paper, however, presents our work on also supporting data objects, and describes how the coexistence of both kinds of objects in each OSD+ is profited to efficiently implement data objects and to speed up some common file operations. We compare our OSD+-based Fusion Parallel File System (FPFS) with Lustre and OrangeFS through different microbenchmarks and HPCS-IO scenarios. Results show that FPFS provides a throughput up to 37× better than Lustre, and up to 95× better than OrangeFS, for metadata workloads. FPFS also provides 34% more bandwidth than OrangeFS for data workloads, and competes with Lustre in data writes. Results also show serious scalability problems in Lustre and OrangeFS that limit their performance.