Worldwide Fast File Replication on Grid Datafarm

Abstract

The Grid Datafarm architecture is designed for global petascale data-intensive computing. It provides a global parallel filesystem with online petascale storage, scalable I/O bandwidth, and scalable parallel processing, and it can exploit local I/O in a grid of clusters with tens of thousands of nodes. One of features is that it manages file replicas in filesystem metadata for fault tolerance and load balancing. This paper discusses and evaluates several techniques to support long-distance fast file replication. The Grid Datafarm manages a ranked group of files as a Gfarm file, each file, called a Gfarm file fragment, being stored on a filesystem node, or replicated on several filesystem nodes. Each Gfarm file fragment is replicated independently and in parallel using rate-controlled HighSpeed TCP with network striping. On a US-Japan testbed with 10,000 km distance, we achieve 419 Mbps using 2 nodes on each side, and 741 Mbps using 4 nodes out of 893 Mbps with two transpacific networks.