DPFS: a distributed parallel file system

One of the challenges brought by large-scale scientific applications is how to avoid remote storage access by collectively using enough local storage resources to hold huge amount of data generated by the simulation while providing high performance I/O. DPFS, a Distributed Parallel File System, is designed and implemented to address this problem. DPFS collects locally distributed unused storage resources as a supplement to the internal storage of parallel computing systems to satisfy the storage capacity requirement of large-scale applications. In addition, like parallel file systems, DPFS provides striping mechanisms that divides a file into small pieces and distributes them across multiple storage devices for parallel data access. The unique feature of DPFS is that it provides three file levels with each file level corresponding to a file striping method. In addition to the traditional linear striping method, DPFS also provides a novel multidimensional striping method that can solve performance problems of linear striping for many popular access patterns. Other issues such as load-balancing and user interface are also addressed in DPFS.