DFS-Perf: A Scalable and Unified Benchmarking Framework for Distributed File Systems

A distributed file system (DFS) is a key component of virtually any cluster computing system. The performance of such system depends heavily on the underlying DFS design and deployment. As a result, it is critical to characterize the performance and design trade-offs of DFSes with respect to cluster configurations and real-world workloads. To this end, we present DFS-Perf, a scalable, extensible, and low-overhead benchmarking framework to evaluate the properties and the performance of various DFS implementations. DFS-Perf uses a highly parallel architecture to cover a large variety of workloads at different scales, and provides an extensible interface to incorporate user-defined workloads and integrate with various DFSes. As a proof of concept, our current DFS-Perf implementation includes several built-in benchmarks and workloads, including machine learning and SQL applications. We present performance comparisons of four stateof-the-art DFS designs, namely Alluxio, CephFS, GlusterFS, and HDFS, on a cluster with 40 nodes (960 cores). We demonstrate that DFS-Perf can provide guidance on existing DFS designs and implementations, while adding 5.7% overhead.