To Waffinity and Beyond: A Scalable Architecture for Incremental Parallelization of File System Code

In order to achieve higher I/O throughput and better overall system performance, it is necessary for commercial storage systems to fully exploit the increasing core counts on modern systems. At the same time, legacy systems with millions of lines of code cannot simply be rewritten for improved scalability. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the multiprocessor software architecture (MP model) employed by the Netapp® Data ONTAP® WAFL® file system as a case study in incrementally scaling a production storage system.

The initial model is based on small-scale data partitioning, whereby user-file reads and writes to disjoint file regions are parallelized. This model is then extended with hierarchical data partitioning to manage concurrent accesses to important file system objects, thus benefiting additional workloads. Finally, we discuss a fine-grained lock-based MP model within the existing data-partitioned architecture to support workloads where data accesses do not map neatly to the predefined partitions. In these data partitioning and lock-based MP models, we have facilitated incremental advances in parallelism without a large-scale code rewrite, a major advantage in the multi-million line WAFL codebase. Our results show that we are able to increase CPU utilization by as much as 104% on a 20-core system, resulting in throughput gains of up to 130%. These results demonstrate the success of the proposed MP models in delivering scalable performance while balancing time-to-market requirements. The models presented can also inform scalable system redesign in other domains.