Experimental evaluation of the Hewlett-Packard exemplar file system

Abstract

This article presents results from an experimental evaluation study of the HP Exemplar file system. Our experiments consist of simple micro-benchmarks that study the impact of various factors on the file system performance. These factors include I/O request/buffer sizes, vectored/non-vectored access patterns, read-ahead policies, multi-threaded (temporally irregular) requests, and architectural issues (cache parameters, NUMA behavior, etc.). Experimental results indicate that the Exemplar file system provides high I/O bandwidth, both for single- and multi-threaded applications. The buffer cache, with prioritized buffer management and large buffer sizes, is effective in exploiting temporal and spatial access localities. The performance of non-contiguous accesses can be improved by either using vectored I/O interfaces or tuning the read-ahead facilities. The file system performance depends on the relative locations of the computing threads and the file system, and also on various Exemplar design parameters such as the NUMA architecture, TLB/data cache management and paging policies.