[Lustre-devel] MDS threading model?

Nathan Rutman Nathan_Rutman at xyratex.com
Mon Apr 18 15:41:10 PDT 2011


Liang, 
we're happy to share all of our Lustre architecture and feature plans, and I'm also optimistic about the way the community has really come together at LUG.  

Our plans for metadata improvements had a bit of a different tack, but it may be that with your SMP improvements there's not much more to be gained in the MDS threading model. (We're actually going to detailed investigation of your patches to see if it's worthwhile to spend more effort here.)  We actually had two ideas for MDS threading improvements - one was along your lines.  The other is a plan to move all the MDT ldiskfs calls from each RPC off into a single queue, instead of making the calls from separate threads.  The queue would be processed by a single dedicated MDT thread.  If our investigation shows there's still a lot of improvement to be gained beyond your patches, we will probably start working on a prototype for this to see if it helps.

Another interesting thing that came out of LUG here besides your presentation was the Terascala work, which really highlighted for me that not all metadata ops are created equal: create rates have a heavy dependence on the OSTs, and that metadata ops performance isn't necessarily a metadata server problem!  It wasn't clear to me if Oleg was saying that they had resolved the OST precreate performance limitations in Lustre 2.1 or if there is still more work to be done there.  (One was a bug limiting the precreates to a small number (looks like WC LU-170 <http://jira.whamcloud.com/browse/LU-170>  just landed for 2.1?), the other is the large growth of directory entries in the OST's 32 object dirs. (bugno?))



On Apr 15, 2011, at 2:21 AM, Nikita Danilov wrote:


	Hi Nathan, Peter,

	I received an interesting message from Liang Zhen, which he kindly permitted me to share. The source is at http://git.whamcloud.com/?p=fs%2Flustre-dev.git;a=shortlog;h=refs%2Fheads%2Fliang%2Fb_smp <http://git.whamcloud.com/?p=fs/lustre-dev.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/liang/b_smp> .

	Thank you,
	Nikita.
	

	Begin forwarded message:


		Hello Nikita,
		
		How are you doing!
		It's great to see Xyratex sharing this white paper:
		http://www.xyratex.com/pdfs/whitepapers/Xyratex_white_paper_Lustre_Architecture_Priorities_Overview_1-0.pdf
		
		it makes me feel the community is stronger than ever, :-), I'm also very interesting in the section " MDS threading model" in the white paper, because I'm working a similar thing for a while, however, I can't see too much detail from the white paper, would it be possible for you to share the idea with me? I will totally understand if you can't, thanks anyway.
		
		Here is what I'm doing on server side threading model now, it's probably totally different thing with what's in the white paper of Xyratex, but I just want to make sure there is no rework, also, any suggestion would be appreciated:
		- divide server resource into several subsets at all stack level: CPUs, memory pools, threads pools, message queues.....
		- each subset is a processing unit which can process a request standalone, unless there is conflict on target resource
		- lifetime of request will be localized on the same processing unit as possible as we can
		- by this way, we can dramatically reduce data migration, thread migration, lock contention between CPUs, and boost performance of metadata request processing.
		- as you can see from above, most server side threads are binding on a few CPUs (not like before, no affinity except OST IO threads)
		- massive number of threads will overkill performance, so limit total number of threads is another key issue, and it's important to support dynamically grow/shrink thread pool
		- ptlrpc service will start more rational number of threads (not like now, user can have thousands threads on MDS easily)
		- we grow number of threads only if some threads in pool are long-blocked
		- ptlrpc service will kill some threads automatically if there are too many active threads and they are not long-blocked.
		
		Again, it's definitely OK if you can't share those information with me, business is business, :-)
		
		Thanks
		Liang




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