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Research Articles

On the efficiency of user-level parallel file systems

  • DENG Tongliang ,
  • CHEN Chen ,
  • YIN Shu
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  • 1 School of Information Science & Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China;
    2 Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China;
    3 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Received date: 2020-03-23

  Revised date: 2020-05-11

  Online published: 2020-05-11

Abstract

A common and easier way to deploy parallel filesystem is using the user-space file system framework (FUSE). However, it serves as an I/O interposition layer which crosses user and kernel space that may introduce significant overhead due to the user-kernel mode switches, context switches and additional memory copies. This paper designs a method based on dynamic linking techniques to bypass FUSE, and implements the interposition layer in user space. This method is implemented and evaluated in parallel log-structured file system which is a popular parallel file system for checkpointing. The experiments and evaluation show that it can improve 131% of the read performance when the transfer block size is large, and improve 5 times write performance at small transfer block size and guarantee no significant write performance downgrade in other scenarios.

Cite this article

DENG Tongliang , CHEN Chen , YIN Shu . On the efficiency of user-level parallel file systems[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2022 , 39(2) : 275 -282 . DOI: 10.7523/j.ucas.2020.0027

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