Scheduling for Improved Write Performance in a Cost- Effective, Fault-Tolerant Parallel Virtual File System (CEFT-PVFS)
Yifeng Zhu, Hong Jiang, Xiao Qin, Dan Feng, David R. Swanson · 2003
Abstract. Without any additional hardware, CEFT-PVFS utilizes the existing disks on each cluster node to provide RAID-10 style parallel I/O service. In CEFT-PVFS, all servers are also computational nodes and can be heavily loaded by different applications running on the cluster, thus potentially degrad-ing the I/O performance. To minimize the degradation, I/O requests can be scheduled on a less loaded server in each mirroring pair. To help define the meaning of “load ” in face of multiple resources such as CPU, memory, disk and network, this paper examines the impacts of these resources by measuring ag-gregate I/O throughput of the simplest CEFT-PVFS configurations, under spe-cific and isolated workload stresses. Based on the heuristic rules found from the experimental results, a scheduling algorithm for dynamic load balancing is de-veloped. In a CEFF-PVFS with 16 data servers, we evaluate this algorithm un-der different workloads. The results show that the proposed scheduling algo-rithm significantly improves the overall performance.