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Improving Performance of Parallel I/O Systems through Selective and Layout-Aware SSD Cache

Parallel file systems (PFS) are widely-used to ease the I/O bottleneck of modern high-performance computing systems. However, PFSs do not work well for small requests, especially small random requests. Newer Solid State Drives (SSD) have excellent performance on small random data accesses, but also incur a high monetary cost. In this study, we propose SLA-Cache, a Selective and Layout-Aware Cache system that employs a small set of SSD-based file servers as a cache of conventional HDD-based file servers. SLA-Cache uses a novel scheme to identify performance-critical data, and conducts a selective cache admission (SCA) policy to fully utilize SSD-based file servers. Moreover, since data layout of the cache system can also largely influence its access performance, SLA-Cache applies a layout-aware cache placement scheme (LCP) to store data on SSD-based file servers. By storing data with an optimal layout requiring the lowest access cost among three typical layout candidates, LCP can further improve system performance. We have implemented SLA-Cache under the MPICH2 I/O library. Experimental results show that SLA-Cache can significantly improve I/O throughput, and is a promising approach for parallel applications.