A Statistical Study for File System Meta Data On High Performance Computing Sites Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Networking

ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Prof. Garth Gibson for working closely with me through the entire study, offering precious advice and guidance and helping connect with industrial and academic HPC sites. I would like to thank my academic adviser Prof. Greg Ganger for offering valuable advice on the paper and defense. I wish to acknowledge Meghan W. Abstract High performance parallel file systems are critical to the performance of super computers, are specialized to provide different computing services and are changing rapidly in both hardware and software, whose unusual access pattern has drawn great research interest. Yet little knowledge of how file systems evolve and how the way people use file systems change is known, even though significant effort and money has been put into upgrading storage device and designing new file systems. In this paper, we report on the statistics of supercomputing file systems from Parallel Data Lab (PDL) and Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) and compare the current data against their statistics 4 years ago to discover changes in technology and usage pattern and to observe new interesting characters.