Abstract
File systems as well as I/O libraries offer interfaces which can be used to interact with them, albeit on different levels of abstraction. While an interface’s syntax simply describes the available operations, its semantics determine how these operations behave and which assumptions developers can make about them. There are several different interface standards in existence, some of them dating back decades and having been designed for local file systems. Examples are the POSIX standard for file system interfaces and the MPI-I/O standard for MPI-based I/O.
Most file systems implement a POSIX-compliant interface to improve portability. While the syntactical part of the interface is usually not modified in any way, the semantics are often relaxed to reach maximum performance. However, this can lead to subtly different behavior on different file systems, which in turn can cause application misbehavior that is hard to track down.
On the other hand, providing only fixed semantics also makes it very hard to achieve optimal performance for different use cases. An additional problem is the fact that the underlying file system does not have any information about the semantics offered in higher levels of the I/O stack. While currently available interfaces do not allow application developers to influence the I/O semantics, applications could benefit greatly from the possibility of being able to adapt the I/O semantics at runtime.
The work we present in this paper includes the design of our semantics-aware I/O interface and a prototypical file system developed to support the interface’s features. Using the proposed I/O interface, application developers can specify their applications’ I/O behavior by providing semantical information. The general goal is an interface where developers can specify what operations should do and how they should behave – leaving the actual realization and possible optimizations to the underlying file system. Due to the unique requirements of the proposed I/O interface, the file system prototype is designed from scratch. However, it uses suitable existing technologies to keep the implementation overhead low.
The new I/O interface and file system prototype are evaluated using parallel metadata benchmarks. Using a single metadata server, they deliver a sustained performance of up to 50,000 lookup and 20,000 create operations per second, which is comparable to – and in some cases, better than – other well-established parallel distributed file systems.
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Kuhn, M. (2013). A Semantics-Aware I/O Interface for High Performance Computing. In: Kunkel, J.M., Ludwig, T., Meuer, H.W. (eds) Supercomputing. ISC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7905. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38750-0_31
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