User Level Implementation of Scalable Directories (GIGA+) (CMU-PDL-08-107)

High performance computing applications are becoming increasingly widespread in a large number of fields. However the performance of I/O sub-systems within such HPC computing environments has not kept pace with extreme processing and communication speeds of such computing clusters. The problem of high performance is tackled by system architects by employing a variety of storage technologies such as Parallel File Systems. While such solutions serve to significantly alleviate the problem of I/O performance scaling they still a lot of roam for improvement because they not endeavor to significanly scale the performance of meta-data operations. Such a situation can easily arise in database or telecommunication applications that create thousands of files per second in a single directory. When this happens, the consequent performance degradation effected by the slowdown of meta-data operations can severely slowdown the performance of the overall I/O system. GIGA+ affords a potential solution to this crucial issue of meta-data performance scaling in I/O sub-systems. GIGA+ is a scalable directory service that aims to scale and parallelize meta-data operations.