PIOD: A Parallel I/O Dispatch Model Based on Lustre File System for Virtual Machine Storage

Virtualization is a key technique for cloud computing. One challenge in it is providing a scalable, high performance and high cost effective data storage for virtual machines. In this paper, we propose a parallel I/O dispatch model called PIOD based on Lustre parallel file system to address this issue. PIOD adopts queue mechanism to coordinate data access requests from clients, avoiding random and concurrent storage access. Doing so contributes to avoid random disk seek overhead, which in turn improves I/O performance of data access. The simulation results show that PIOD is effective and can improve I/O throughput about 26.3% on average.