Improving I/O performance in HPC environments using the Expand Ad-Hoc file system Articles uri icon

publication date

  • November 2025

start page

  • 1

end page

  • 42

volume

  • 81

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0920-8542

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1573-0484

abstract

  • This work introduces an exhaustive evaluation, including both benchmarks and real-world data-intensive applications, performed in MareNostrum 4 and HPC4AI Laboratory supercomputers using the Expand Ad-Hoc file system. Expand Ad-Hoc is an ad-hoc file system that dynamically virtualizes the local storage available on compute nodes (i.e., SSD, SHM, etc.) into a fast storage volume to reduce congestion on parallel file systems used as backends in High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments. The main contributions of this work include the design of a new ad-hoc parallel file system, called Expand Ad-Hoc, compatible with POSIX and MPI-IO, and an exhaustive and comprehensive evaluation of Expand. The evaluation compares the performance obtained using IOR and DLIO benchmarks and Nek5000 and Remote Sensing real-world applications on Expand Ad-Hoc, GekkoFS, GPFS, and BeeGFS, showing satisfactory results proving that Expand Ad-Hoc can be used in HPC environments to improve the I/O performance of data-intensive applications transparently.

subjects

  • Computer Science

keywords

  • ad hoc file system; high-performance computing (hpc); distributed file system; parallel system evaluation; data-intensive application