Experimental Analysis of File Transfer Rates over Wide-Area Dedicated Connections

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-20-2017

Abstract

File transfers over dedicated connections, supported by large parallel file systems, have become increasingly important in high-performance computing and big data workflows. It remains a challenge to achieve peak rates for such transfers due to the complexities of file I/O, host, and network transport subsystems, and equally importantly, their interactions. We present extensive measurements of disk-to-disk file transfers using Lustre and XFS file systems mounted on multi-core servers over a suite of 10 Gbps emulated connections with 0-366 ms round trip times. Our results indicate that large buffer sizes and many parallel flows do not always guarantee high transfer rates. Furthermore, large variations in the measured rates necessitate repeated measurements to ensure confidence in inferences based on them. We propose a new method to efficiently identify the optimal joint file I/O and network transport parameters using a small number of measurements. We show that for XFS and Lustre with direct I/O, this method identifies configurations achieving 97% of the peak transfer rate while probing only 12% of the parameter space.

Identifier

85013635220 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781509042968]

Publication Title

Proceedings 18th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications 14th IEEE International Conference on Smart City and 2nd IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Systems Hpcc Smartcity Dss 2016

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCC-SmartCity-DSS.2016.0038

First Page

198

Last Page

205

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