Hare: a file system for non-cache-coherent multicores
Author(s)
Gruenwald, Charles; Sironi, Filippo; Kaashoek, M. Frans; Zeldovich, Nickolai
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Hare is a new file system that provides a POSIX-like interface on multicore processors without cache coherence. Hare allows applications on different cores to share files, directories, and file descriptors. The challenge in designing Hare is to support the shared abstractions faithfully enough to run applications that run on traditional shared-memory operating systems, with few modifications, and to do so while scaling with an increasing number of cores.
To achieve this goal, Hare must support features (such as shared file descriptors) that traditional network file systems don't support, as well as implement them in a way that scales (e.g., shard a directory across servers to allow concurrent operations in that directory). Hare achieves this goal through a combination of new protocols (including a 3-phase commit protocol to implement directory operations correctly and scalably) and leveraging properties of non-cache-coherent multiprocessors (e.g., atomic low-latency message delivery and shared DRAM).
An evaluation on a 40-core machine demonstrates that Hare can run many challenging Linux applications (including a mail server and a Linux kernel build) with minimal or no modifications. The results also show these applications achieve good scalability on Hare, and that Hare's techniques are important to achieving scalability.
Date issued
2015-04Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '15)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Charles Gruenwald, III, Filippo Sironi, M. Frans Kaashoek, and Nickolai Zeldovich. 2015. Hare: a file system for non-cache-coherent multicores. In Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 30, 16 pages.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
9781450332385