Characterizing Concurrency Control Performance for the PIOUS Parallel File System

Parallel le systems employ data declustering to increase I/O throughput. But because a single read or write operation can generate data accesses on multiple independent storage devices, a concurrency control mechanism must be employed to retain familiar le access semantics. Concurrency control negates some of the performance beneets of data declustering by introducing additional le access overhead. This paper examines the performance characteristics of the transaction-based concurrency control mechanism implemented in the PIOUS parallel le system. Results demonstrate that linearizability of le access operations is provided without loss of scalability or stability.