Improving the Performance of Cluster Applications through I/O Proxy Architecture

Clusters are the most common solutions for high perfor-mance computing at the present time. In this kind of sys-tems, an important challenge is the I/O subsystem design. Typically, these environments are not flexible enough and the only way to solve performance bottlenecks is adding new hardware. In this paper, we show how an I/O proxy-based architecture can improve the I/O performance of clus-ter applications in three ways: adapting to the application requirements, reducing the load on the I/O nodes, and fi-nally, increasing the global performance of the storage sys-tem.