LabStor: A modular and extensible platform for developing high-performance, customized I/O stacks in userspace
Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis · ACM
Abstract
Traditionally, I/O systems have been developed within the confines of a centralized OS kernel. This led to monolithic and rigid storage systems that are limited by low development speed, expressiveness, and performance. Various assumptions are imposed including reliance on the UNIX-file abstraction, the POSIX standard, and a narrow set of I/O policies. However, this monolithic design philosophy makes it difficult to develop and deploy new I/O approaches to satisfy the rapidly-evolving I/O requirements of modern scientific applications. To this end, we propose LabStor: a modular and extensible platform for developing high-performance, customized I/O stacks. Single-purpose I/O modules (e.g, I/O schedulers) can be developed in the comfort of userspace and released as plug-ins, while end-users can compose these modules to form workload- and hardware-specific I/O stacks. Evaluations show that by switching to a fully modular design, tailored I/O stacks can yield performance improvements of up to 60% in various applications.
Connected work
Citation
@inproceedings{logan2022labstor,
author = {Logan, Luke and Garcia, Jaime Cernuda and Lofstead, Jay and Sun, Xian--He and Kougkas, Anthony},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis},
title = {LabStor: A modular and extensible platform for developing high-performance, customized I/O stacks in userspace},
year = {2022},
month = nov,
publisher = {ACM},
volume = {},
number = {},
pages = {1--15},
keywords = {Storage Bridging, Elastic Storage, I/O Acceleration, Task-Based I/O},
doi = {10.1109/SC41404.2022.00028},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10046077},
}