IO optimizations and data access

Technical specification/requirements

Every participant will have a private node to run the exercises. It is not possible nor needed to run the exercises on a personal laptop because results are not comparable.

The exercises will be provided on a dynamic web page with hints and solutions. The link will be published on Tuesday.

Exercise Overview

The tutorial will start with an introduction to tools used in Linux environments to measure and analyze IO performance. Based on few examples participants will be able to measure individual IO bottlenecks present in hard- and software. The second part will demonstrate optimizations in various parts of the local storage architecture like write-caching, read-ahead, compound reads etc. The third part will be an exercise illustrating the power and potential of Cloud storage where students will apply the technology of distributed hash tables to build a private cloud storage system.