Storage system support for Swift

by Thiago Silva for The Globus Alliance

Swift is a parallel scripting system for computing at petascale level. Building a system at this scale is not an easy task. The particular case of data management is handled using collective data management and data-aware dispatching. However, there is still space for improvement. We propose to use a shared file system deployed across all storage nodes and enable the application to pass hints about its data usage patterns. These hints are used by the storage layer to optimize its operations.