IMCa: A High Performance Caching Front-End for GlusterFS on InfiniBand

Abstract

With the rapid advances in computing technology, there is an explosion in media that needs to collected, cataloged, stored and accessed. With the speed of disks not keeping pace with the improvements in processor and network speed, the ability of network file systems to provide data to demanding applications at an appropriate rate is diminishing. In this paper, we propose to enhance the performance of network file systems by providing an Intermediate bank of cache servers between the client and server called (IMCa). Whenever possible, file system operations from the client are serviced from the cache bank. We evaluate IMCa with a number of different benchmarks. The results of these experiments demonstrate that the intermediate cache architecture can reduce the latency of certain operations by upto 82% over the native implementation and upto 86% compared with the Lustre file system. In addition, we also see an improvement in the performance of data transfer operations in most cases and for most scenarios. Finally the caching hierarchy helps us to achieve better scalability of file system operations.