R&D: SLRL, Simple Least Remaining Lifetime File Eviction Policy for HPC Multi-Tier Storage Systems

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review has published an article written by Louis-Marie Nicolas, Luis Thomas, ENSTA Bretagne – Lab-STICC, CNRS, UMR 6285 Brest, France, Yassine Hadjadj-Aoul, IRISA – Univ. Rennes 1 Rennes, France, and Jalil Boukhobza, ENSTA Bretagne – Lab-STICC, CNRS, UMR 6285 Brest, France.

Abstract: “HPC systems are composed of multiple tiers of storage, from the top high performance tier (high speed SSDs) to the bottom capacitive one (tapes). File placement in such architecture is managed through prefetchers (bottom-up) and eviction policies (top-down). Most state-of-the-art work focus on the former while using algorithm flavors of LRU, LFU and FIFO for the latter. LRU was for long considered the best choice. However, recent studies has shown that the simplicity of FIFO could make it more scalable than LRU because of metadata management, and thus more adequate in several cases. In this paper, we propose a new eviction policy based on predicted files lifetimes. It is comparable to FIFO in terms of metadata overhead and simplicity (thus scalability), while giving a hit ratio comparable to LRU (or even 10% better for some tested traces). We also propose a naive multi-tier heterogeneous storage simulator implementation to evaluate such policies.“