The Performance of PFS, the Compaq Sierra Product's Parallel File System

Technical Report · Wed Jun 20 00:00:00 EDT 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/15006183· OSTI ID:15006183

Uselton, A C

In FY 2000 Livermore Computing took delivery of serial number one of the Compaq Sierra high performance cluster product. The Sierra product employs a derivative of the Tru64 UNIX operating system called Tru-Cluster, which provides a cluster-wide parallel file system called PFS. This report documents the observed performance of PFS along with the performance of some of the underlying file system components. Testing reveals that the underlying AdvFS file system does a good job of read-ahead and write-behind I/O performance enhancement at the expense of a high CPU utilization. On the other hand, PFS performs at only a fraction of the speed that the underlying I/O and communication hardware allow.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy (US)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 15006183
• Report Number(s): UCRL-ID-144018; TRN: US200405%%321
• Resource Relation: Other Information: PBD: 20 Jun 2001
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
COMMUNICATIONS
PERFORMANCE
TESTING
VELOCITY