TY  - GEN
AV  - public
ID  - heidok8930
Y1  - 2008///
KW  - storage 
KW  -  distributed filesystem
TI  - Analyzing Metadata Performance in Distributed File Systems
N2  - Distributed file systems are important building blocks in modern computing environments. The challenge of increasing I/O bandwidth to files has been largely resolved by the use of parallel file systems and sufficient hardware. However, determining the best means by which to manage large amounts of metadata, which contains information about files and directories stored in a distributed file system, has proved a more difficult challenge.  The objective of this thesis is to analyze the role of metadata and present past and current implementations and access semantics. Understanding the development of the current file system interfaces and functionality is a key to understanding their performance limitations. Based on this analysis, a distributed metadata benchmark termed DMetabench is presented. DMetabench significantly improves on existing benchmarks and allows stress on metadata operations in a distributed file system in a parallelized manner. Both intranode and inter-node parallelity, current trends in computer architecture, can be explicitly tested with DMetabench. This is due to the fact that a distributed file system can have different semantics inside a client node rather than semantics between multiple nodes.  As measurements in larger distributed environments may exhibit performance artifacts difficult to explain by reference to average numbers, DMetabench uses a time-logging technique to record time-related changes in the performance of metadata operations and also protocols additional details of the runtime environment for post-benchmark analysis. Using the large production file systems at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Munich, the functionality of DMetabench is evaluated by means of measurements on different distributed file systems. The results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods proposed but also provide unique insight into the current state of metadata performance in modern file systems. 
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/8930/
A1  - Biardzki, Christoph
ER  -