Improved Read Performance in a Cost-Effective, Fault-Tolerant Parallel Virtual File System (CEFT-PVFS)

Overview

Due to the ever-widening performance gap between processors and disks, I/O operations tend to become the major performance bottleneck of data-intensive applications on modern clusters. CEFT-PVFS (a RAID 10 style parallel file system that extends the original PVFS), as one such system, divides the cluster nodes into two groups, stripes the data across one group in a round-robin fashion, and then duplicates the same data to the other group to provide storage service of high performance and high reliability. This paper presents another benefit of CEFT-PVFS in which the aggregate peak read performance can be improved by as much as 100% over that of the original PVFS by exploiting the increased parallelism.