Performance Evaluation of a Distributed File System with Locality-Aware Metadata Lookups

GMount is a high-performance distributed file system with locality-aware metadata lookups and small installation effort. GMount organizes computer nodes in a decentralized hierarchical overlay to unify separate local file systems into a global shared namespace and achieve locality-aware metadata lookups. GMount offers not only better performance when application executes with considerable data access locality, but also the ability to effortlessly and rapidly enable data sharing among clusters, clouds, and supercomputers. This paper presents performance evaluation of the latest GMount implementation by using both micro-benchmark and real-world data-intensive applications. Experimental results demonstrate that GMount has highly scalable metadata and I/O operation performance when data access locality is common, and the performance of GMount is practically useful for routine data-intensive computing practice.