IndexFS

"The growing size of modern storage systems is expected to exceed billions of objects, making metadata scalability critical to overall performance. Many existing distributed file systems only focus on providing highly parallel fast access to file data, and lack a scalable metadata service.

We introduce a middleware design called IndexFS that adds support to existing file systems such as PVFS, Lustre, and HDFS for scalable high-performance operations on metadata and small files. IndexFS uses a table-based architecture that incrementally partitions the namespace on a per-directory basis using GIGA+ technique, preserving server and disk locality for small directories. An optimized log-structured layout is used to store metadata and small files efficiently. IndexFS applies two client-based storm-free caching techniques: bulk namespace insertion for creation intensive workloads such as N-N checkpointing; and stateless consistent metadata caching for hot spot mitigation.

By combining these techniques, IndexFS can scale to at least 128 metadataservers, because that is the biggest test we have tried so far. Experiments show our out-of-core metadata throughput out-performing existing solutions such as PVFS, Lustre, and HDFS by 50% to two orders of magnitude."

http://pdl.cmu.edu/indexfs/index.shtml

https://github.com/zhengqmark/indexfs

https://github.com/zhengqmark/indexfs_old

http://pdl.cmu.edu/index.shtml