Optimizing the Ceph Distributed File System for High Performance Computing Kisik Jeong Carl Duffy Jin-Soo Kim Joonwon Lee Sungkyunkwan University Seoul National University Seoul National University Sungkyunkwan University Suwon, South Korea Seoul, South Korea Seoul, South Korea Suwon, South Korea
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—With increasing demand for running big data ana- ditional HPC workloads. Traditional HPC workloads perform lytics and machine learning workloads with diverse data types, reads from a large shared file stored in a file system, followed high performance computing (HPC) systems consequently need by writes to the file system in a parallel manner. In this case, to support diverse types of storage services. Ceph is one possible candidate for such HPC environments, as Ceph provides inter- a storage service should provide good sequential read/write faces for object, block, and file storage. Ceph, however, is not performance. However, Ceph divides large files into a number designed for HPC environments, thus it needs to be optimized of chunks and distributes them to several different disks. This for HPC workloads. In this paper, we find and analyze problems feature has two main problems in HPC environments: 1) Ceph that arise when running HPC workloads on Ceph, and propose translates sequential accesses into random accesses, 2) Ceph a novel optimization technique called F2FS-split, based on the F2FS file system and several other optimizations. We measure needs to manage many files, incurring high journal overheads the performance of Ceph in HPC environments, and show that in the underlying file system.