Collective caching: application-aware client-side file caching

Parallel file subsystems in today's high-performance computers adopt many I/O optimization strategies that were designed for distributed systems. These strategies, for instance client-side file caching, treat each I/O request process independently, due to the consideration that clients are unli...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:HPDC-14. Proceedings. 14th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, 2005 pp. 81 - 90
Main Authors: Wei-keng Liao, Coloma, K., Choudhary, A., Ward, L., Russell, E., Tideman, S.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2005
Subjects:
Application software
Concurrent computing
Data structures
File servers
File systems
Laboratories
Libraries
Message passing
Parallel processing
ISBN:9780780390379, 0780390377
ISSN:1082-8907
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Parallel file subsystems in today's high-performance computers adopt many I/O optimization strategies that were designed for distributed systems. These strategies, for instance client-side file caching, treat each I/O request process independently, due to the consideration that clients are unlikely related with each other in a distributed environment. However, it is inadequate to apply such strategies directly in the high-performance computers where most of the I/O requests come from the processes that work on the same parallel applications. We believe that client-side caching could perform more effectively if the caching subsystem is aware of the process scope of an application and regards all the application processes as a single client. In this paper, we propose the idea of "collective caching" which coordinates the application processes to manage cache data and achieve cache coherence without involving the I/O servers. To demonstrate this idea, we implemented a collective caching subsystem at user space as a library, which can be incorporated into any message passing interface implementation to increase its portability. The performance evaluation is presented with three I/O benchmarks on an IBM SP using its native parallel file system, GPFS. Our results show significant performance enhancement obtained by collective caching over the traditional approaches.
ISBN:9780780390379
0780390377
ISSN:1082-8907
DOI:10.1109/HPDC.2005.1520940