Log-Assisted Straggler-Aware I/O Scheduler for High-End Computing

Object-based parallel file systems have emerged as promising storage solutions for high-end computing (HEC) systems. Despite the fact that object storage provides a flexible interface, scheduling highly concurrent I/O requests that access a large number of objects still remains as a challenging problem, especially in the case when stragglers (storage servers that are significantly slower than others) exist in the system. An efficient I/O scheduler needs to avoid possible stragglers to achieve low latency and high throughput. In this paper, we introduce a log-assisted straggler-aware I/O scheduling to mitigate the impact of storage server stragglers. The contribution of this study is threefold. First, we introduce a client-side, log-assisted, straggler-aware I/O scheduler architecture to tackle the storage straggler issue in HEC systems. Second, we present two scheduling algorithms that can make efficient decision on scheduling I/Os while avoiding stragglers based on such an architecture. Third, we evaluate the proposed I/O scheduler using simulations. The simulation results have confirmed the promise of the newly introduced log-assisted straggler-aware I/O scheduler in large-scale HEC systems.