Garth Gibson, Panasas Inc. & CMU and
Peter Corbett,
Network Appliance, Inc., July 2004
This draft considers the problem of limited bandwidth to NFS servers.
The bandwidth limitation exists because an NFS server has limited
network, CPU, memory and disk I/O resources. Yet, access to any one
file system through the NFSv4 protocol requires that a single server
be accessed. While NFSv4 allows file system migration, it does not
provide a mechanism that supports multiple servers simultaneously
exporting a single writable file system.
This problem has become aggravated in recent years with the advent of
very cheap and easily expanded clusters of application servers that
are also NFS clients. The aggregate bandwidth demands of such
clustered clients, typically working on a shared data set
preferentially stored in a single file system, can increase much more
quickly than the bandwidth of any server. The proposed solution is
to provide for the parallelization of file services, by enhancing
NFSv4 in a minor version.
P-Reg is a performance regression suite and debugging tool for parallel NFS (pNFS). The tool allows the user to run performance tests on pNFS system and simultaneously collect debug information. It provides the user with summarized outputs of the tests and debug information to compare 2 or more diffrent runs and also debug performance issues. P-reg runs on Linux Operating system and is tested using the pNFS over PVFS2 implementation available at CITI.
It is necessary to download 3 files to compile the tool.
We thank the members and companies of the PDL Consortium: Amazon, Google, Hitachi Ltd., Honda, Intel Corporation, IBM, Meta, Microsoft Research, Oracle Corporation, Pure Storage, Salesforce, Samsung Semiconductor Inc., Two Sigma, and Western Digital for their interest, insights, feedback, and support.