Project Report for Project Shared Parallel File System

In recent years, shared parallel file system has been a new hot area for the high throughput computing. Many systems have been developed for this purpose, which include PVFS2 and GFS. These systems were being studied in my project. In this project, the concept of such a shared parallel file system has been built up by installing it on four nodes of the LISA cluster at SARA (Stichting Academische Rekeningcentrum Amsterdam). After the Installation of PVFS2 and GFS, a number of experiments have been organized to compare the performance of two file systems. The results are discussed in the experiment section of this report. The installation of PVFS2 and GFS as well as how to configure such file systems on the LISA cluster nodes are also described in this report. In this report, the following aspects have been included: 1. Background information about shared parallel file system. 2. The PVFS2 files system. 3. The GFS file system. 4. The comparison of two file systems. 5. What problems could be encountered when exploring the possibility of the maximum performance of two systems. 6. At the end, the conclusion of this project comparing two file systems and the recommendation for the usage by SARA.