Bottleneck detection in parallel file systems with trace-based performance monitoring

Abstract

Today we recognize a high demand for powerful storage. In industry this issue is tackled either with large storage area networks, or by deploying parallel file systems on top of RAID systems or on smaller storage networks. The bigger the system gets the more important is the ability to analyze the performance and to identify bottlenecks in the architecture and the applications. We extended the performance monitor available in the parallel file system PVFS2 by including statistics of the server process and information of the system. Performance monitor data is available during runtime and the server process was modified to store this data in off-line traces suitable for post-mortem analysis. These values can be used to detect bottlenecks in the system. Some measured results demonstrate how these help to identify bottlenecks and may assists to rank the servers depending on their capabilities. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.