Marching Towards Nirvana: Configurations for Very High Performance Parallel File Systems

Over the past 7 years, the San Diego Supercomputer Center has worked to produce the highest possible performance file systems available to the National Science Foundation community in the USA. Most of this was done with GPFS, IBM´s parallel file system, but several distinctly different configurations were designed and implemented with numerous lessons learned in the process. All of these systems provided transfer rates in the multiple GB/s range. In this paper, we detail the configurations and their intended modes of operation and, as much as possible, show the resulting performance. We attempt to describe the advantages and disadvantages of each approach with an emphasis on the implications for future systems