I/O Congestion Avoidance via Routing and Object Placement
David Dillow, Galen M Shipman, Sarp Oral, Zhe Zhang · 2011
As storage systems get larger to meet the the demands of petascale systems, careful planning must be applied to avoid congestion points and extract the maximum performance. In addition, the large size of the data sets generated by such systems makes it desirable for all compute resources in a center to have common access to this data without needing to copy it to each machine. This paper describes a method of placing I/O close to the storage nodes to minimize contention on Cray’s SeaStar2+ network, and extends it to a routed Lustre configuration to gain the same benefits when running against a center-wide file system. Our experiments show performance improvements for both direct attached and routed file systems.