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Design and evaluation of a user-level file system for fast storage devices

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Abstract

Lately, fast storage devices are rapidly increasing in social network services, cloud platforms, etc. Unfortunately, the traditional Linux I/O stack is designed to maximize performance on disk-based storage. Emerging byte-addressable and low-latency non-volatile memory technologies (e.g., phase-change memories, MRAMs, and the memristor) provide very different characteristics, so the disk-based I/O stack cannot lead to high performance. This paper presents a high performance I/O stack for the fast storage devices. Our scheme is to remove the concept of block and to simplify the whole I/O path and software stack, which results in only two layers that are the byte-capable interface and the byte-aware file system called BAFS. We aim to minimize I/O latency and maximize bandwidth by eliminating the unnecessary layers and supporting byte-addressable I/O without requiring changes to applications. We have implemented a prototype and evaluated its performance with multiple benchmarks. The experimental results show that our I/O stack achieves 6.2 times on average and up to 17.5 times performance gains compared to the existing Linux I/O stack.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 0421-20150075) and partly supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2014R1A1A2055032).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Yongseok Son, Nae Young Song, Hyuck Han, Hyeonsang Eom & Heon Young Yeom

  2. Department of Computer Science, Dongduk Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea

    Hyuck Han

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  1. Yongseok Son
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  2. Nae Young Song
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  3. Hyuck Han
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  4. Hyeonsang Eom
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  5. Heon Young Yeom
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hyeonsang Eom.

Additional information

A preliminary version [18] of this paper was presented at AMGCC 2014, London, England.

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Son, Y., Song, N.Y., Han, H. et al. Design and evaluation of a user-level file system for fast storage devices . Cluster Comput 18, 1075–1086 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-015-0465-5

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