A Performance-Effective and High-Scalable Grid File System

A high-performance file system is normally a key point for large cluster installations, where hundreds or even thousands of nodes frequently need to manage large volumes of data. Distributed Storage Resource Broker (SRB) Server architecture is designed for facilitating reliable file sharing and high-performance distributed and parallel data computing in a Grid across administrative domains by providing a global virtual file system. SRBFS is an attempt to implement a global virtual file system that supports a complete set of standard POSIX APIs, while still retaining the parallel and distributed data computing feature of distributed SRBFS Server architecture. In this paper we investigate the possibilities of a distributed model for the SRB server which is based on SDSC SRB client-server middleware. A prototype has been built upon the user-level SRBFS and a performance evaluation is carried out. We present a comparison of wide-area file transfer performance of the SRBFS and SEMPIAR which is SRB enabled MPIIO library for access to remote storage. On the NCHC cluster, the ROMIO Perf benchmark attained an aggregate write bandwidth of 225 MBbps with 12 clients. The benchmark results are encouraging and show that distributed SRB Server provides applications with scalable, high-bandwidth I/O across wide area networks.