Pascal - A New Parallel And Scalable Server Io Networking Infrastructure For Supporting Global Storage/File Systems In Large-Size Linux Clusters

This paper presents the design and implementation of a new I/O networking infrastructure, named PaScal(1) (Parallel and Scalable I/O Networking Framework). PaScal is used to support high data bandwidth IP based global storage systems for large scale Linux clusters. PaScal has several unique properties. It employs'(1) Multi-level switch-fabric interconnection network by combining high speed interconnects for computing Inter-Process Communication (IPC) requirements and low-cost Gigabit Ethernet interconnect for global IP based storage/file access, (2) A bandwidth on demand scaling I/O networking architecture, (3) Open-standard IP networks (routing and switching), (4) Multipath routing for load balancing and failover, (5) Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing software, and (6) Supporting a global file system in multi-cluster and multi-platform environments. We describe both the hardware and software components of our proposed PaScal.We have implemented the PaScal I/O infrastructure on several large-size Linux clusters at LANL. We have conducted a sequence of parallel MPT-IO assessment benchmarks on LANL's Pink 1024 node Linux cluster and the Panasas global parallel file system. Performance results from our parallel MPI-IO benchmarks on the Pink cluster demonstrate that the PaScal I/O Infrastructure is robust and capable of scaling in bandwidth on large-size Linux clusters.