A prediction-based dynamic file assignment strategy for parallel file systems

• An analysis model of file assignment and access are generalized.
• A load prediction model in parallel file systems is proposed.
• A prediction-based dynamic file assignment strategy (PDFA) is proposed.
• We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Nowadays, the rapid development of the internet calls for a high performance file system, and a lot of efforts have already been devoted to the issue of assigning nonpartitioned files in a parallel file system with the aim of pursuing a prompt response to requests. Yet most of the existing strategies still fail to bring about an optimal performance on system mean response time metrics, and new strategies which can achieve better performance in terms of mean response time become indispensable for parallel file systems. This paper, while addressing the issue of assigning nonpartitioned files in parallel file systems where the file accesses exhibit Poisson arrival rates and fixed service times, presents an on-line file assignment strategy, named prediction-based dynamic file assignment (PDFA), to minimize the mean response time among disks under different workload conditions, and a comparison of the PDFA with the well-known file assignment algorithms, such as HP and SOR. Comprehensive experimental results show that PDFA is able to improve the performance consistently in terms of mean response time among all algorithms for comparison.