Using IKAROS to provide Scalable I/O bandwidth

TL;DR

This paper introduces IKAROS, a utility for building scalable storage platforms that leverage numerous I/O nodes to significantly increase bandwidth, with performance evaluations against GPFS.

Contribution

The paper presents IKAROS as a novel utility enabling scalable storage formations and high bandwidth, demonstrated through performance comparisons with GPFS.

Findings

IKAROS achieves higher aggregate throughput than GPFS.

Performance scales with the number of I/O nodes.

Benchmark results show effective bandwidth increase.

Abstract

We present IKAROS as a utility that permit us to form scalable storage platforms. IKAROS enable us to create ad-hoc nearby storage formations and use a huge number of I/O nodes in order to increase the available bandwidth. We measure the performance and scalability of IKAROS versus the IBMs General Parallel File System (GPFS) under a variety of conditions. The measurements are based on benchmark programs that allow us to vary block sizes and to measure aggregate throughput rates.