Unifier: unifying cache management and communication buffer management for PVFS over InfiniBand

The advent of networking technologies and high performance transport protocols facilitates the service of storage over networks. However, they pose challenges in integration and interaction among storage server application components and system components. In this paper, we put forward a component, called Unifier, to provide more efficient integration and better interaction among these components. Unifier has three notable features: (1) Unifier integrates cache management and communication buffer management; it offers a single copy data sharing among all components in a server application safely and concurrently; (2) it reduces memory registration and deregistration costs to enable applications to take full advantage of RDMA operations; (3) it provides means to achieve adaptation, application-specific optimization, and better cooperation among different components. This work presents the design and implementation of Unifier. This component has been deployed and evaluated in a version of PVFS1 implemented over InfiniBand. Experimental results show performance improvements between 30% and 70% over other approaches. Better scalability is also achieved by the PVFS I/O servers.