Metadata Performance Project

The Metadata Performance Project is a joint project that the Lustre team, the ORNL LCE, and Cray created in early spring of 2009 to investigate SMP scaling improvements for the Lustre metadata stack. Current areas of investigation include LNET, ptlrpc, libcfs, and the MDS server. The overall goal is to maximize single MDS performance through optimizations that utilize the multiple cores available in today's MDS machines.

The project has the following primary goals:
 * Understand current Lustre 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0 branch metadata performance characteristics.
 * Double the current average performance of Lustre 1.6 branch metadata performance.
 * Though introduction of clustered metadata for early exposure in Lustre 2.x and until the general release of CMD, ensure that Lustre metadata scales and performs as well as, or better than, GPFS metadata scaling.

Baseline metadata performance tests were completed by the Lustre team on May 11, 2009.