Parallel File System Assessment

This paper reports our benchmarking work on available market solutions for parallel filesystems to deal with I/O in small cluster computing environments. Our aim is to present performance assessment of different parallel filesystem products. Different solutions were installed and then benchmarked on a small testing platform. The goal is to identify and implement the best solution both in terms of easiness of use and configuration, and in term of read/write performance. This study, even though limited by the size and the overall peak performance of the hardware setup, can give interesting information to research groups in search of a low cost parallel storage solution for small medium/size clusters.