NUMA-aware I/O System Call Steering

To fully utilize the ever-increasing network and storage I/O bandwidth, there have been significant studies on interrupt steering that scatters I/O events raised by peripherals across multiple cores. However, less attention has been paid to system call steering that distributes actual processing of I/O system calls to multiple cores apart from application contexts. In this study, we suggest three different policies for I/O system call steering named Single-NUMA-Node, Per-NUMA-Node, and Cross-NUMA-Node that address the issues of parallelism between I/O operations, locality of data, and distance to I/O devices to improve utilization of network and storage I/O bandwidth on NUMA-based multi-core systems. The performance measurement results of our preliminary implementations show that the Cross-NUMA-Node policy can reduce the execution time of MapReduce applications up to 34% on a Hadoop cluster.