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Energy Efficiency of Parallel File Systems on an ARM Cluster

Authors:
Timm Leon Erxleben
Kira Duwe
Jens Saak
Martin Köhler
Michael Kuhn

Keywords: energy efficiency, CephFS, OrangeFS, x86, ARM

Abstract:
Parallel distributed file systems are typically run on dedicated storage servers that clients connect to via the network. Regular x86 servers provide high computational power, often not required for storage management and handling I/O requests. Therefore, storage servers often use low core counts but still have a relatively high idle power consumption. This leads to high energy consumption, even for mostly idle file systems. Advanced Reduced Instruction Set Computer Machines (ARM) systems are very energy-efficient but still provide adequate performance for file system use cases. Leveraging this fact, we built an ARM-based storage system, on which we tested both CephFS and OrangeFS. We compare the performance and energy efficiency of x86 and ARM systems using several metrics. Results show that while our ARM-based approach currently provides less throughput per Watt for reads, it achieves an approximately 121% higher write efficiency when compared to a traditional x86 Ceph cluster.

Pages: 42 to 48

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2022

Publication date: May 22, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-412X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-967-6

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from May 22, 2022 to May 26, 2022