For a decade, the Ceph distributed file system followed the conventional wisdom of building its storage back-end on top of local file systems. This is a preferred choice for most distributed file systems today, because it allows them to benefit from the convenience and maturity of battle-tested code. Ceph's experience, however, shows that this comes at a high price. First, developing a zero-overhead transaction mechanism is challenging. Second, metadata performance at the local level can significantly affect performance at the distributed level. Third, supporting emerging storage hardware is painstakingly slow. Ceph addressed these issues with BlueStore, a new backend designed to run directly on raw storage devices. In only two years since its inception, BlueStore outperformed previous established backends and is adopted by 70% of users in production. By running in user space and fully controlling the I/O stack, it has enabled space-efficient metadata and data checksums, fast overwrites of erasure-coded data, inline compression, decreased performance variability, and avoided a series of performance pitfalls of local file systems. Finally, it makes the adoption of backward-incompatible storage hardware possible, an important trait in a changing storage landscape that is learning to embrace hardware diversity.

For a decade, the Ceph distributed file system followed the conventional wisdom of building its storage backend on top of local file systems. This is a preferred choice for most distributed file systems today because it allows them to benefit from the convenience and maturity of battle-tested code. Ceph's experience, however, shows that this comes at a high price. First, developing a zero-overhead transaction mechanism is challenging. Second, metadata performance at the local level can significantly affect performance at the distributed level. Third, supporting emerging storage hardware is painstakingly slow. Ceph addressed these issues with BlueStore, a new back-end designed to run directly on raw storage devices. In only two years since its inception, BlueStore outperformed previous established backends and is adopted by 70% of users in production. By running in user space and fully controlling the I/O stack, it has enabled space-efficient metadata and data checksums, fast overwrites of erasure-coded data, inline compression, decreased performance variability, and avoided a series of performance pitfalls of local file systems. Finally, it makes the adoption of backwards-incompatible storage hardware possible, an important trait in a changing storage landscape that is learning to embrace hardware diversity.

efforts, and findings made direct contributions to Ceph's development and improved code quality, scalability, and performance. These changes should also benefit both Ceph and HPC communities at large. Throughout the evaluation, we observed that Ceph still is an evolving technology under fast-paced development and showing great promises.

Ceph is an emerging open-source parallel distributed file and storage system. By design, Ceph leverages unreliable commodity storage and network hardware, and provides reliability and fault-tolerance via controlled object placement and data replication. This paper presents our file and block I/O performance and scalability evaluation of Ceph for scientific high-performance computing (HPC) environments. Our work makes two unique contributions. First, our evaluation is performed under a realistic setup for a large-scale capability HPC environment using a commercial high-end storage system. Second, our path of investigation, tuning efforts, and findings made direct contributions to Ceph's development and improved code quality, scalability, and performance. These changes should benefit both Ceph and the HPC community at large.