Understanding the Effect of Multiple Factors on a Parallel File System's Performance

Abstract

This research work presents an investigation of the impact of a wide range of factors on the performance of parallel file systems (PFSs). It is the result of an extensive test campaign with three distinct computing platforms and value variations for eleven factors that advance the understanding of PFSs' behaviour under different conditions. Our main contributions are the characterization of effects not fully explained or misunderstood in the literature previously. First, we demonstrate that no significant performance variation (≈ 6%) is observed when choosing one among four TCP congestion-avoidance algorithms. Second, we detail the effect of the page cache of I/O nodes on a PFS's write throughput and how it relates to other factors.