IndexFS is designed as file system middleware layered on top of an
existing cluster file system deployment to improve metadata performance
as well as small file operation efficiency of the original file system.
IndexFS reuses the data path of the underlying file system and packs
directory entries, file attributes, and small file data into a set of
large, immutable, log-structured, and indexed, data structures
(SSTables) that are stored in the underlying file system. Our
experiments show that IndexFS is able to our-perform existing solutions
such as PVFS, Lustre, and HDFS, by as much as orders of magnitude.
The following is a guide describing how to install and run IndexFS on your local Linux machine. Please visit our project home at http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/indexfs for more information. Please also note that the current implementation of IndexFS is not of production quality and is recommended to be used for research purpose only. Thanks a lot.
- System Prerequisites
- Build from Source
- IndexFS in Standalone Mode
IndexFS depends on gflags, glog, and thrift. In order to build
IndexFS from its source, you will also need a C++ building system
such as GUN including gcc, g++, make, autoconf, automake,
and libtool.
In addition, some benchmarks that IndexFS uses to evaluate system
performance are build with MPI -- at least one implementation of MPI
(OpenMPI) should be present for these benchmarks to compile and run.
To help ease IndexFS deployment and avoid dependency issues, IndexFS provides gflags, glog, and thrift source packages along with its src code. System administrators may directly use these packages to build and install these required IndexFS dependencies.
-
Ubuntu
apt-get install gcc g++ make flex bison apt-get install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config apt-get install zlib1g-dev libsnappy-dev apt-get install libboost-all-dev libevent-dev libssl-dev apt-get install pdsh libfuse-dev libopenmpi-dev -
Opensuse
zypper install gcc gcc-c++ make flex bison zypper install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config zypper install zlib-devel snappy-devel zypper install boost-devel libevent-devel libopenssl-devel zypper install psmisc pdsh fuse-devel openmpi openmpi-devel
Use GNU standard building process to build and install gflags,
glog, and thrift, in that order.
-
To build gflags and glog:
./configure && make && sudo make install
NB: thrift's automake scripts have several known bugs, which will cause both make and make install to fail. However, those errors are not vital in terms of building and installation. Just ignore them and life is still good.
-
To build thrift:
./configure || make || sudo make install || exit 0
IndexFS also follows GNU standard building process. For your
convenience, IndexFS provides bootstrap.sh which does this
automatically for you.
-
To build IndexFS:
./bootstrap.sh
NB: you don't have to install IndexFS into your system. Our scripts will not assume IndexFS binaries to be accessible from your system path.
Running IndexFS in standalone mode is a quick way to test if IndexFS has been successfully built.
By being standalone, we mean running one single IndexFS (metadata) server instance and multiple client processes at one single machine. So everything is in one box.
-
To start IndexFS server:
$INDEXFS_HOME/sbin/start-idxfs.sh -
To start IndexFS clients (processes) and run tests:
$INDEXFS_HOME/sbin/tree-test.sh -
To stop IndexFS server:
$INDEXFS_HOME/sbin/stop-idxfs.sh
In the above scripts, IndexFS server will be started as a daemon running in the background. It's pid will be remembered at /tmp/indexfs/metadata_server.pid.
A simple MPI-based test will be performed against IndexFS in terms of its metadata path. The test will fork 2 client processes to collectively create and stat 1600 files under 1 single shared directory. This test is expected to conclude in less than 1 second.