Optimizing I/O server placement for parallel I/O on switch-based irregular networks

In this paper, we study I/O server placement for optimizing parallel I/O performance on switch-based clusters, which typically adopt irregular network topologies to allow construction of scalable systems with incremental expansion capability. Finding optimal solution to this problem is computationally intractable. We quantified the number of messages travelling through each network link by a workload function, and developed three heuristic algorithms to find good solutions based on the values of the workload function. Our simulation results demonstrate performance advantage of our algorithms over a number of algorithms commonly used in existing parallel systems. In particular, the load-balance-based algorithm is superior to the other algorithms in most cases, with improvement ratio of 10% to 95% in terms of parallel I/O throughput.