On the Efficient Usage of High-Speed Networks for Distributed Storage in Clusters

Parallel applications running on clusters require both high-performance communications between nodes and efficient access to the storage system. We propose to improve the performance of distributed storage systems in clusters by efficiently using the underlying high-performance network to access remote storage systems. Storage and parallel computation have very different requirements. We show that it is required to modify the network programming interfaces and detail several proposals to make these interfaces interact more smoothly with distributed storage. Performance evaluations show that the integration of these ideas makes highspeed networks easy to use and very efficient in the context of storage.