Revisiting the Metadata Architecture of Parallel File Systems

As the types of problems we solve in high-performance computing and other areas become more complex, the amount of data generated and used is growing at a rapid rate. Today many terabytes of data are common; tomorrow petabytes of data will be the norm. Much work has been put into increasing capacity and I/O performance for large-scale storage systems. However, one often ignored area is metadata management. Metadata can have a significant impact on the performance of a system. Past approaches have moved metadata activities to a separate server in order to avoid potential interference with data operations. However, with the advent of object-based storage technology, there is a compelling argument to recouple metadata and data. In this paper we present two metadata management schemes, both of which remove the need for a separate metadata server and replace it with object-based storage.