The in-house distributed file system called GluonFS, created by the UW-Madison Computer Sciences department’s Netlab Research Group, has been ranked 26th in the 10-node category and 33rd overall by IO500, which ranks high-performance storage systems worldwide every year. GluonFS runs over the MadRacks testbed, connected with 400GbE RDMA networks, and achieves 73.48 GiB/s. The project is led by second-year graduate student Omid Rostamabadi, advised by Computer Sciences professor Ming Liu, whose research interests span areas such as distributed systems, networking, and operating systems. Leveraging fast I/O technology, GluonFS can deliver ultra-low latency storage access comparable to local ones. GluonFS is powered by a scalable distributed object storage system developed by Netlab, offering a solid foundation for high-performance and efficient storage access.
Liu heads the The Netlab Research Group, the aim of which is to build efficient and practical networked systems driven by hardware infrastructures. “The storage infrastructure has evolved drastically, driven by high-bandwidth networking fabrics, fast remote storage protocols, and emerging storage media,” says Liu. “This creates a significant challenge for building high-performance distributed storage systems. We embrace I/O scalability into the design and implementation.” GluonFS takes an end-to-end design principle and optimizes I/O processing at each system component. Liu added, “We will further optimize the system performance and reliability, expand its backend infrastructure, and use GluonFS for practical production use cases.”
Congratulations to Ming Liu, Omid Rostamabadi, and their team!