Cost-Effective High-Performance Disk Access on PC Clusters with Commodity IDE Disks

摘要

A critical component of system performance is disk access. A parallel I/O throughput of 1 Gigabyte/sec was first measured on ASCI Red (with 18 hardware RAIDs costing one million dollars). Our goal was to achieve similar performance on PC clusters with commodity IDE disks. We succeeded in improving I/O price/performance by over a factor of 100 by configuring the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) with 32 overlapped I/O and compute nodes, each having two IDE disks in a software RAID configuration (costing $112 per disk). By harnessing the power of commodity IDE disks on remote nodes, high-performance disk access now seems affordable, even for small businesses and universities.