The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Workshop: 3rd International Workshop on HPC Testing and Evaluation of Systems, Tools, and Software (HPCTESTS 2025)
Authors: Niccolo Tosato and Isac Pasianotto (University of Trieste, Area science park) and Ruggero Lot and Stefano Cozzini (Area science park)
Abstract: Distributed Filesystems (DFS) are a crucial component of modern computing environments, and their performance is critical to the success of all the facilities that rely on them. However, predicting the DFS I/O performance solely based on the storage system hardware is not trivial. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting an empirical method that tries to quantitatively assess how hardware configuration choices influence the performance of a DFS using Ceph as a case study. We investigate the influence of three hardware parameters—number of CPU cores, amount of RAM, and disk bandwidth. To control these variables, we relied on the Linux hotplug interface and Cgroups, avoiding additional software overhead. Our results reveal that for the analyzed workloads, decreasing hardware resources does not always yield proportional performance losses. This method offers practical insights for designing cost-effective distributed storage systems, remaining general enough to be applied to other filesystems.
Back to 3rd International Workshop on HPC Testing and Evaluation of Systems, Tools, and Software (HPCTESTS 2025) Archive Listing Back to Full Workshop Archive Listing