Journal of Computer Science and Technology ›› 2021, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (1): 44-55.doi: 10.1007/s11390-020-0783-9

Special Issue: Computer Architecture and Systems

• Special Section on Memory-Centric System Research for High-Performance Computing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A GPU-Accelerated In-Memory Metadata Management Scheme for Large-Scale Parallel File Systems

Zhi-Guang Chen, Member, CCF, Yu-Bo Liu, Yong-Feng Wang, and Yu-Tong Lu*, Distinguished Member, CCF        

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
  • Received:2020-07-05 Revised:2020-12-30 Online:2021-01-05 Published:2021-01-23
  • Contact: Yu-Tong Lu E-mail:yutong.lu@nscc-gz.cn
  • About author:Zhi-Guang Chen received his B.S. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science and technology from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha. He is an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou. His current research interest includes distributed file system, network storage, and solid-state storage system.
  • Supported by:
    This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2018YFB0203904, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61872392, U1811461 and 61832020, the Pearl River Science and Technology Nova Program of Guangzhou under Grant No. 201906010008, Guangdong Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. 2018B030312002, the Major Program of Guangdong Basic and Applied Research under Grant No. 2019B030302002, the Program for Guangdong Introducing Innovative and Entrepreneurial Teams under Grant No. 2016ZT06D211, and the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guang Dong Province of China under Grant No. 2019B010107001.

Driven by the increasing requirements of high-performance computing applications, supercomputers are prone to containing more and more computing nodes. Applications running on such a large-scale computing system are likely to spawn millions of parallel processes, which usually generate a burst of I/O requests, introducing a great challenge into the metadata management of underlying parallel file systems. The traditional method used to overcome such a challenge is adopting multiple metadata servers in the scale-out manner, which will inevitably confront with serious network and consistence problems. This work instead pursues to enhance the metadata performance in the scale-up manner. Specifically, we propose to improve the performance of each individual metadata server by employing GPU to handle metadata requests in parallel. Our proposal designs a novel metadata server architecture, which employs CPU to interact with file system clients, while offloading the computing tasks about metadata into GPU. To take full advantages of the parallelism existing in GPU, we redesign the in-memory data structure for the name space of file systems. The new data structure can perfectly fit to the memory architecture of GPU, and thus helps to exploit the large number of parallel threads within GPU to serve the bursty metadata requests concurrently. We implement a prototype based on BeeGFS and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our proposal, and the experimental results demonstrate that our GPU-based solution outperforms the CPU-based scheme by more than 50% under typical metadata operations. The superiority is strengthened further on high concurrent scenarios, e.g., the high-performance computing systems supporting millions of parallel threads.

Key words: GPU-accelerated; in-memory; metadata management; parallel file system;

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