Enhancing functionality and performance in the PVM network computing system

The research funded by this grant is part of an ongoing research project in heterogeneous distributed computing with the PVM system, at Emory as well as at Oak Ridge Labs and the University of Tennessee. This grant primarily supports research at Emory that continues to evolve new concepts and systems in distributed computing, but it also includes the PI`s ongoing interaction with the other groups in terms of collaborative research as well as software systems development and maintenance. We have continued our second year efforts (July 1995 - June 1996), on the same topics as during the first year, namely (a) visualization of PVM programs to complement XPVM displays; (b) I/O and generalized distributed computing in PVM; and (c) evolution of a multithreaded concurrent computing model. 12 refs

Metadata And Data Management In High Performance File And Storage Systems

With the advent of emerging e-Science applications, today\u27s scientific research increasingly relies on petascale-and-beyond computing over large data sets of the same magnitude. While the computational power of supercomputers has recently entered the era of petascale, the performance of their storage system is far lagged behind by many orders of magnitude. This places an imperative demand on revolutionizing their underlying I/O systems, on which the management of both metadata and data is deemed to have significant performance implications. Prefetching/caching and data locality awareness optimizations, as conventional and effective management techniques for metadata and data I/O performance enhancement, still play their crucial roles in current parallel and distributed file systems. In this study, we examine the limitations of existing prefetching/caching techniques and explore the untapped potentials of data locality optimization techniques in the new era of petascale computing. For metadata I/O access, we propose a novel weighted-graph-based prefetching technique, built on both direct and indirect successor relationship, to reap performance benefit from prefetching specifically for clustered metadata serversan arrangement envisioned necessary for petabyte scale distributed storage systems. For data I/O access, we design and implement Segment-structured On-disk data Grouping and Prefetching (SOGP), a combined prefetching and data placement technique to boost the local data read performance for parallel file systems, especially for those applications with partially overlapped access patterns. One high-performance local I/O software package in SOGP work for Parallel Virtual File System in the number of about 2000 C lines was released to Argonne National Laboratory in 2007 for potential integration into the production mode

Characterizing Concurrency Control Performance for the PIOUS Parallel File System

Parallel file systems employ data declustering to increase I/O throughput. But because a single read or write operation can generate data accesses on multiple independent storage devices, a concurrency control mechanism must be employed to retain familiar file access semantics. Concurrency control negates some of the performance benefits of data declustering by introducing additional file access overhead. This paper examines the performance characteristics of the transaction-based concurrency control mechanism implemented in the PIOUS parallel file system. Results demonstrate that linearizability of file access operations is provided without loss of scalability or stability. 1 Introduction Parallel computers commonly employ a parallel file system in an effort to offset the growing disparity in computational and I/O capability [dC94]. Parallel file systems address the I/O bottleneck by logically aggregating multiple independent storage devices into a single highperformance storage subsy..