Speaker
Description
POSIX access remains the de facto dominant access mechanism in HPC environments, defining how applications and workflows interact with large-scale storage systems. With its NFSv4.1/pNFS protocol implementation, dCache provides a native integration into HPC environment supporting a large number of scientific applications.
The recent development efforts in dCache have concentrated on strengthening NFSv4.1/pNFS protocols implementation to better meet HPC-workload expectations.
This contribution presents the latest advancements in dCache’s NFS stack, highlighting two major improvements. First is NFS open delegation, which significantly reduces the number of network round-trips for some applications, thereby reducing file-opening latency. And the second is zero-copy reads, which allow data to flow directly from the backend storage device to the network stack without CPU-bound copying, thereby significantly reducing CPU consumption and increasing sustained read bandwidth.
Together, open delegation and zero-copy reads are a substantial step toward making dCache more efficient, scalable, and HPC-oriented. This presentation will detail the design decisions, implementation experience, performance results, and deployment considerations that demonstrate how these protocol-level enhancements strengthen dCache as a robust, standards-compliant storage platform for the global scientific and HPC communities.