DISTRIBUTED FILE SYSTEMS MODELING FOR SYSTEMATIC AND PRACTICAL PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK

Performance analysis is an important concern in the distributed system research area. Researchers have made a lot effort to evaluate, model, and analyze distributed systems for computing intensive or data intensive applications. There exist well-known evaluation benchmarks (e.g., LINPACK, mpiBLAST) for computing paradigms. In this paper, we propose a systematic and practical performance analysis framework, driven by architecture and design models for defining the structure and behavior of typical master/slave DFSs. We put forward a configuration guideline for specifications of configuration alternatives of such DFSs, and a practical approach for both qualitatively and quantitatively performance analysis of DFSs with various configuration settings in a systematic way. What distinguish our approach from others is that 1) most of existing works rely on performance measurements under a variety of workloads/strategies, comparing with other DFSs or running application programs, but our approach is based on architecture and design level models and systematically derived performance models; 2) our approach is able to both qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the performance of DFSs; and 3) our approach not only can evaluate the overall performance of a DFS but also its components and individual steps. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). A series of real-world experiments on EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), Tansuo and Inspur Clusters, were conducted to qualitatively evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. We also performed a set of experiments of HDFS on EC2 to quantitatively analyze the performance and limitation of the metadata server of DFSs. Results show that our approach can achieve sufficient performance analysis. Similarly, the proposed approach could be also applied to evaluate other DFSs such as MooseFS, GFS, and zFS.