Shared Parallel Filesystems in Heterogeneous Linux Multi-Cluster Environments

In this paper, we examine parallel filesystems for shared deployment across multiple Linux clusters running with different hardware architectures and operating systems. Specifically, we deploy PVFS2, GPFS, Lustre, and TerraFS in our test environment containing Intel Xeon, Intel x86-64, and IBM PPC970 systems. We comment on the feature sets of each filesystem, describe our implementation and configuration experiences, and present initial performance benchmark results. Our analysis shows that all of the parallel filesystems outperform a legacy NFS system but with different levels of complexity. Each of the filesystems demonstrates the best performance under certain conditions. Three of the systems – GPFS, Lustre and TerraFS – depend on specific kernel versions that increase administrative complexity and can reduce interoperability.