A configurable rule based classful token bucket filter network request scheduler for the lustre file system

HPC file systems today work in a best-effort manner where individual applications can flood the file system with requests, effectively leading to a denial of service for all other tasks. This paper presents a classful Token Bucket Filter (TBF) policy for the Lustre file system. The TBF enforces Remote Procedure Call (RPC) rate limitations based on (potentially complex) Quality of Service (QoS) rules. The QoS rules are enforced in Lustre's Object Storage Servers, where each request is assigned to an automatically created QoS class. The proposed QoS implementation for Lustre enables various features for each class including the support for high-priority and real-time requests even under heavy load and the utilization of spare bandwidth by less important tasks under light load. The framework also enables dependent rules to change a job's RPC rate even at very small timescales. Furthermore, we propose a Global Rate Limiting (GRL) algorithm to enforce system-wide RPC rate limitations.