Parallel I/O system for a clustered computing environment

Abstract

To evaluate the influence coming with the system availability, we should experiment a parallel file system and a revised system with the availability based on the former then compare performance differences. Journaling and redundancy are two main techniques in this domain. In this thesis, we choose a popular parallel file system, the Parallel Virtual File System, as the prototype to primarily evaluate the effects on systems after bringing in the availability. We mount 2 PVFS systems on a client to build up a Twin-PVFS and use our own API functions to implement the RAID-1 Level redundancy evaluate its influences. First, a series of tests in different situations, such as the data file size, network and the number of I/O node, is designed to totally measure the performance of PVFS. Then we choose some data that are proper to be compared and test our Twin-PVFS and the original PVFS on the same circumstances and parameters. For the comparability, a parallel access mode with PVFS API also has been tested. The journaling mode was presented also. The test result shows that this availability reduces the system performance a lot but this influence differs in the specific situations, i.e. the network bandwidth and the file data size.