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4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies—Abstract
Pp. 17–30 of the Proceedings
Providing Tunable Consistency for a Parallel File Store
Murali Vilayannur, Partho Nath, and Anand Sivasubramaniam, Pennsylvania State University
Abstract
Consistency, throughput, and scalability form the backbone
of a cluster-based parallel file system. With little
or no information about the workloads to be supported,
a file system designer has to often make a oneglove-fits-all decision regarding the consistency policies.
Taking a hard stance on consistency demotes throughput
and scalability to second-class status, having to make do
with whatever leeway is available. Leaving the choice
and granularity of consistency policies to the user at
open/mount time provides an attractive way of providing
the best of all worlds. We present the design and implementation
of such a file-store, CAPFS (Content Addressable
Parallel File System), that allows the user to define
consistency semantic policies at runtime. A client-side
plug-in architecture based on user-written plug-ins leaves
the choice of consistency policies to the end-user. The
parallelism exploited by use of multiple data stores provides
for bandwidth and scalability. We provide extensive
evaluations of our prototype file system on a concurrent
read/write workload and a parallel tiled visualization
code.
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