S4D-Cache: Smart Selective SSD Cache for Parallel I/O Systems

Parallel file systems (PFS) are widely-used in modern computing systems to mask the ever-increasing performance gap between computing and data access. PFSs favor large requests, and do not work well for small requests, especially small random requests. Newer Solid State Drives (SSD) have excellent performance on small random data accesses, but also incur a high monetary cost. In this study, we propose a hybrid architecture named the Smart Selective SSD Cache (S4D-Cache), which employs a small set of SSD-based file servers as a selective cache of conventional HDD-based file servers. A novel scheme is introduced to identify performance-critical data, and conduct selective cache admission to fully utilize the hybrid architecture in terms of data-access parallelism and randomness. We have implemented an S4D-Cache under the MPI-IO and PVFS2 parallel file system. Our experiments show that S4D-Cache can significantly improve I/O throughput, and is a promising approach for parallel applications.