DMFSsim: A distributed metadata file system simulator

Parallel file systems deploy multiple metadata servers to distribute heavy metadata workload from clients. With the increasing number of metadata servers, metadata-intensive operations are facing some problems related with collaboration among them, compromising the performance gain. Consequently, a file system simulator is very helpful to try out some optimization ideas to solve these problems. In this paper, we propose DMFSsim to simulate the metadata-intensive operations on large-scale distributed metadata file systems. DMFSsim can flexibly replay traces of multiple metadata operations, support several commonly used metadata distribution algorithms, simulate file system tree hierarchy and underlying disk blocks management mechanism in real systems. Extensive simulations show that DMFSsim is capable of demonstrating the performance of metadata-intensive operations in distributed metadata file system.