ABSTRACT

Proceedings of ASPLOS’04, October 7–13 ,2004, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

DSPTF: Decentralized Request Distribution in Brick-based Storage Systems

Christopher R. Lumb,* Richard Golding,** Gregory R. Ganger

* CMU and IBM Almaden
**IBM Almaden Research

Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Distributed Shortest-Positioning Time First (D-SPTF) is a request distribution protocol for decentralized systems of storage servers. D-SPTF exploits high-speed interconnects to dynamically select which server, among those with a replica, should service each read request. In doing so, it simultaneously balances load, exploits the aggregate cache capacity, and reduces positioning times for cache misses. For network latencies expected in storage clusters (e.g., 10-200µs), D-SPTF performs as well as would a hypothetical centralized system with the same collection of CPU, cache, and disk resources. Compared to popular decentralized approaches, D-SPTF achieves up to 65% higher throughput and adapts more cleanly to heterogenous server capabilities.

KEYWORDS: Storage systems, Brick Based Storage, Distributed Systems, Disk Scheduling, Decentralized Systems

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