hpc / hpc/mpifileutils

dtar: support creating archives in NFS

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Dominant language
C
Stars
200
Forks
85
Avg merge
3d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

Unlike Lustre or GPFS, NFS is not as forgiving when writing a file with multiple processes. At at minimum when writing an archive file on NFS, we need to:

  1. use an algorithm in which processes align file offsets on memory page boundaries
  2. and we should use fcntl lock/unlock

After we compute the offset of entry headers (and data), we need to reassign work to processes based on page/block boundary alignment. In fact, different portions of an entry header may need to be written by different processes if it happens to span a page boundary. Also, the work to copy data chunks should be adjusted to align on page boundaries based on their offset within the archive file.

A similar problem exists for dbz2.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing dtar's archive-writing path, especially offset computation, entry-header handling, and data-chunk copying. Study how the work is assigned across processes, then determine how NFS requires page or block alignment and fcntl locking; done means archive creation follows those rules, with the similar dbz2 problem addressed or explicitly scoped.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
distributed-systems, operating-systems, performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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