No Arabic abstract
Access libraries such as ROOT and HDF5 allow users to interact with datasets using high level abstractions, like coordinate systems and associated slicing operations. Unfortunately, the implementations of access libraries are based on outdated assumptions about storage systems interfaces and are generally unable to fully benefit from modern fast storage devices. The situation is getting worse with rapidly evolving storage devices such as non-volatile memory and ever larger datasets. This project explores distributed dataset mapping infrastructures that can integrate and scale out existing access libraries using Cephs extensible object model, avoiding re-implementation or even modifications of these access libraries as much as possible. These programmable storage extensions coupled with our distributed dataset mapping techniques enable: 1) access library operations to be offloaded to storage system servers, 2) the independent evolution of access libraries and storage systems and 3) fully leveraging of the existing load balancing, elasticity, and failure management of distributed storage systems like Ceph. They also create more opportunities to conduct storage server-local optimizations specific to storage servers. For example, storage servers might include local key/value stores combined with chunk stores that require different optimizations than a local file system. As storage servers evolve to support new storage devices like non-volatile memory, these server-local optimizations can be implemented while minimizing disruptions to applications. We will report progress on the means by which distributed dataset mapping can be abstracted over particular access libraries, including access libraries for ROOT data, and how we address some of the challenges revolving around data partitioning and composability of access operations.
To accommodate the needs of large-scale distributed P2P systems, scalable data management strategies are required, allowing applications to efficiently cope with continuously growing, highly dis tributed data. This paper addresses the problem of efficiently stor ing and accessing very large binary data objects (blobs). It proposesan efficient versioning scheme allowing a large number of clients to concurrently read, write and append data to huge blobs that are fragmented and distributed at a very large scale. Scalability under heavy concurrency is achieved thanks to an original metadata scheme, based on a distributed segment tree built on top of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). Our approach has been implemented and experimented within our BlobSeer prototype on the Grid5000 testbed, using up to 175 nodes.
One of the major performance and scalability bottlenecks in large scientific applications is parallel reading and writing to supercomputer I/O systems. The usage of parallel file systems and consistency requirements of POSIX, that all the traditional HPC parallel I/O interfaces adhere to, pose limitations to the scalability of scientific applications. Object storage is a widely used storage technology in cloud computing and is more frequently proposed for HPC workload to address and improve the current scalability and performance of I/O in scientific applications. While object storage is a promising technology, it is still unclear how scientific applications will use object storage and what the main performance benefits will be. This work addresses these questions, by emulating an object storage used by a traditional scientific application and evaluating potential performance benefits. We show that scientific applications can benefit from the usage of object storage on large scales.
Erasure codes are an integral part of many distributed storage systems aimed at Big Data, since they provide high fault-tolerance for low overheads. However, traditional erasure codes are inefficient on reading stored data in degraded environments (when nodes might be unavailable), and on replenishing lost data (vital for long term resilience). Consequently, novel codes optimized to cope with distributed storage system nuances are vigorously being researched. In this paper, we take an engineering alternative, exploring the use of simple and mature techniques -juxtaposing a standard erasure code with RAID-4 like parity. We carry out an analytical study to determine the efficacy of this approach over traditional as well as some novel codes. We build upon this study to design CORE, a general storage primitive that we integrate into HDFS. We benchmark this implementation in a proprietary cluster and in EC2. Our experiments show that compared to traditional erasure codes, CORE uses 50% less bandwidth and is up to 75% faster while recovering a single failed node, while the gains are respectively 15% and 60% for double node failures.
This paper presents an approach for constructing distributed storage system based on micro-service architecture. By building storage functionalities using micro services, we can provide new capabilities to a distributed storage system in a flexible way. We take erasure coding and compression as two case studies to show how to build a micro-service based distributed storage system. We also show that by building erasure coding and compression as micro-services, the distributed storage system still achieves reasonable performance compared to the monolithic one.
We consider shared-object systems that require their threads to fulfill the system jobs by first acquiring sequentially the objects needed for the jobs and then holding on to them until the job completion. Such systems are in the core of a variety of shared-resource allocation and synchronization systems. This work opens a new perspective to study the expected job delay and throughput analytically, given the possible set of jobs that may join the system dynamically. We identify the system dependencies that cause contention among the threads as they try to acquire the job objects. We use these observations to define the shared-object system equilibria. We note that the system is in equilibrium whenever the rate in which jobs arrive at the system matches the job completion rate. These equilibria consider not only the job delay but also the job throughput, as well as the time in which each thread blocks other threads in order to complete its job. We then further study in detail the thread work cycles and, by using a graph representation of the problem, we are able to propose procedures for finding and estimating equilibria, i.e., discovering the job delay and throughput, as well as the blocking time. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new perspective, that can provide better analytical tools for the problem, in order to estimate performance measures similar to ones that can be acquired through experimentation on working systems and simulations, e.g., as job delay and throughput in (distributed) shared-object systems.