Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 15, numbers 3 and 4, 2022 // View article

Green Storage: Parallel File Systems on ARM

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

Keywords: energy efficiency; parallel distributed file systems; 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 different parallel distributed file systems. We compare the performance and energy efficiency of x86 and ARM systems using several metrics. Analysis of the different file systems on the ARM system shows that energy efficiency highly depends on the architecture and the used file system. Results show that while our ARM-based approach currently provides less throughput per Watt for reads, it achieves an approximately 174% higher write efficiency when compared to a traditional x86 Ceph cluster.

Pages: 200 to 210

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2022. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2022

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628