@inproceedings{SPEOSIOKKL12,
author = {Michael Kuhn and Julian Kunkel and Thomas Ludwig},
title = {{Simulation-Aided Performance Evaluation of Server-Side Input/Output Optimizations}},
year = {2012},
booktitle = {{20th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing}},
editor = {Rainer Stotzka and Michael Schiffers and Yiannis Cotronis},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, Washington, Tokyo},
pages = {562--566},
conference = {PDP 2012},
organization = {Munich Network Management Team},
location = {Garching, Germany},
isbn = {978-0-7695-4633-9},
issn = {1066-6192},
abstract = {The performance of parallel distributed file systems suffers from many clients executing a large number of operations in parallel, because the I/O subsystem can be easily overwhelmed by the sheer amount of incoming I/O operations. Many optimizations exist that try to alleviate this problem. Client-side optimizations perform preprocessing to minimize the amount of work the file servers have to do. Server-side optimizations use server-internal knowledge to improve performance. The HDTrace framework contains components to simulate, trace and visualize applications. It is used as a testbed to evaluate optimizations that could later be implemented in real-life projects. This paper compares existing client-side optimizations and newly implemented server-side optimizations and evaluates their usefulness for I/O patterns commonly found in HPC. Server-directed I/O chooses the order of non-contiguous I/O operations and tries to aggregate as many operations as possible to decrease the load on the I/O subsystem and improve overall performance. The results show that server-side optimizations beat client-side optimizations in terms of performance for many use cases. Integrating such optimizations into parallel distributed file systems could alleviate the need for sophisticated client-side optimizations. Due to their additional knowledge of internal workflows server-side optimizations may be better suited to provide high performance in general.},
}