IBM General Parallel File System


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IBM GPFS
Developed by IBM
Latest release 3.2.1-7 / October 2008
OS AIX / Linux / Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2
Type filesystem
License Proprietary
Website www.ibm.com

GPFS (General Parallel File System) is a high-performance shared-disk clustered file system developed by IBM. It is used by many of the supercomputers that populate the Top 500 List, which enumerates the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.[1] For example, GPFS is the filesystem of the ASC Purple Supercomputer,[2] which is composed of more than 12,000 processors and has 2 petabytes of total disk storage spanning more than 11,000 disks.

Like some other cluster filesystems, GPFS provides concurrent high-speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes of clusters. It can be used with AIX 5L clusters, Linux clusters, on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX, Linux and Windows nodes. In addition to providing filesystem storage capabilities, GPFS provides tools for management and administration of the GPFS cluster and allows for shared access to file systems from remote GPFS clusters.

GPFS has been available on AIX since 1998, on Linux since 2001 and on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 (64-Bit) since 2008, and is offered as part of the IBM System Cluster 1350.

Contents

History

GPFS began as the Tiger Shark file system, a research project at IBM's Almaden Research Center as early as 1993. Shark was initially designed to support high throughput multimedia applications. This design turned out to be well suited to scientific computing.[3]

Another ancestor of GPFS is IBM's Vesta filesystem, developed as a research project at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center between 1992-1995.[4] Vesta introduced the concept of file partitioning to accommodate the needs of parallel applications that run on high-performance multicomputers with parallel I/O subsystems. With partitioning, a file is not a sequence of bytes, but rather multiple disjoint sequences that may be accessed in parallel. The partitioning is such that it abstracts away the number and type of I/O nodes hosting the filesystem, and it allows a variety of logical partitioned views of files, regardless of the physical distribution of data within the I/O nodes. The disjoint sequences are arranged to correspond to individual processes of a parallel application, allowing for improved scalability.[5]

Vesta was commercialized as the PIOFS filesystem around 1994,[6] and was succeeded by GPFS around 1998.[7][8] The main difference between the older and newer filesystems was that GPFS replaced the specialized interface offered by Vesta/PIOFS with the standard Unix API: all the features to support high performance parallel I/O were hidden from users and implemented under the hood.[3][8] Today, GPFS is used by many of the top 500 supercomputers listed on the Top 500 Supercomputing Sites web site. Since inception GPFS has been successfully deployed for many commercial applications including: digital media, grid analytics and scalable file service.

Versions:

  • GPFS 3.2, September 2007
    • GPFS 3.2.1-2, April 2008
    • GPFS 3.2.1-4, July 2008
    • GPFS 3.2.1-6, September 2008
    • GPFS 3.2.1-7, October 2008
  • GPFS 3.1
  • GPFS 2.3.0-29

Architecture

GPFS provides high performance by allowing data to be accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS provides higher input/output performance by "striping" blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, and reading and writing these blocks in parallel. Other features provided by GPFS include high availability, support for heterogeneous clusters, disaster recovery, security, DMAPI, HSM and ILM.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Tools

GPFS is designed to help achieve data lifecycle management efficiencies through policy-driven automation and tiered storage management. Storage pools, filesets and user-defined policies provide the ability to better match the cost of storage resources to the value of your data.

Storage pools allow for the grouping of disks within a file system. Tiers of storage can be created by grouping disks based on performance, locality or reliability characteristics. For example, one pool could be high performance fibre channel disks and another more economical SATA storage.

A fileset is a sub-tree of the file system namespace and provides a way to partition the namespace into smaller, more manageable units. Filesets provide an administrative boundary that can be used to set quotas and be specified in a policy to control initial data placement or data migration. Data in a single fileset can reside in one or more storage pools. Where the file data resides and how it is migrated is based on a set of rules in a user defined policy.

There are two types of user defined policies in GPFS: File placement and File management. File placement policies direct file data as files are created to the appropriate storage pool. File placement rules are determined by attributes such as file name, the user name or the fileset. File management policies allow the file's data to be moved or replicated or files deleted. File management policies can be used to move data from one pool to another without changing the file's location in the directory structure. File management policies are determined by file attributes such as last access time, path name or size of the file.

The GPFS policy processing engine is scalable and can be run on many nodes at once. This allows management policies to be applied to a single file system with billions of files and complete in a few hours.

Related articles

See also

References

  1. ^ Schmuck, Frank; Roger Haskin (January 2002). "GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters" (pdf). Proceedings of the FAST'02 Conference on File and Storage Technologies: 231-244, Monterey, California, USA: USENIX. Retrieved on 2008-01-18. 
  2. ^ "Storage Systems - Projects - GPFS" (html). IBM. Retrieved on 2008-06-18.
  3. ^ a b May, John M. (2000). Parallel I/O for High Performance Computing, Morgan Kaufmann. pp. p. 92. ISBN 1558606645, http://books.google.com/books?id=iLj516DOIKkC&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=shark+vesta+gpfs&source=web&ots=QZacitX9F6&sig=C7BxilSY8P_qWWX9z0EtSLjVGNA&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA92,M1. Retrieved on 18 June 2008. 
  4. ^ Corbett, Peter F.; Feitelson, Dror G.; Prost, J.-P.; Baylor, S. J. (1993), "Parallel access to files in the Vesta file system", Supercomputing, Portland, Oregon, United States: ACM/IEEE, pp. 472-481, doi:10.1145/169627.169786 
  5. ^ Corbett, Peter F.; Feitelson, Dror G. (August 1996), "The Vesta parallel file system" (pdf), Transactions on Computer Systems (ACM) 14 (3): pp. 225-264, doi:10.1145/233557.233558, http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2002/cmsc818s/Readings/vesta-tocs96.pdf, retrieved on 18 June 2008 
  6. ^ Corbett, P. F.; D. G. Feitelson, J.-P. Prost, G. S. Almasi, S. J. Baylor, A. S. Bolmarcich, Y. Hsu, J. Satran, M. Snir, R. Colao, B. D. Herr, J. Kavaky, T. R. Morgan, and A. Zlotek (1995). "Parallel file systems for the IBM SP computers" (pdf). IBM System Journal 34 (2): 222-248, http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/342/corbett.pdf. Retrieved on 18 June 2008. 
  7. ^ Barris, Marcelo; Terry Jones, Scott Kinnane, Mathis Landzettel Safran Al-Safran, Jerry Stevens, Christopher Stone, Chris Thomas, Ulf Troppens (September 1999). Sizing and Tuning GPFS, IBM Redbooks, International Technical Support Organization. pp. see page 1 ("GPFS is the successor to the PIOFS file system"), http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg245610.pdf. 
  8. ^ a b Snir, Marc (June 2001). "Scalable parallel systems: Contributions 1990-2000" (pdf). HPC seminar, Computer Architecture Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Retrieved on 2008-06-18.

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