Alluxio (alluxio.io) is an open-source data orchestration system that provides a single namespace federating multiple external distributed storage systems. It is critical for Alluxio to be able to store and serve the metadata of all files and directories from all mounted external storage both at scale and at speed.
This talk shares our design, implementation, and optimization of Alluxio metadata service (master node) to address the scalability challenges. Particularly, we will focus on how to apply and combine techniques including tiered metadata storage (based on off-heap KV store RocksDB), fine-grained file system inode tree locking scheme, embedded state-replicate machine (based on RAFT), exploration and performance tuning in the correct RPC frameworks (thrift vs gRPC) and etc. As a result of the combined above techniques, Alluxio 2.0 is able to store at least 1 billion files with a significantly reduced memory requirement, serving 3000 workers and 30000 clients concurrently.
In this Office Hour, we will go over how to:
- Metadata storage challenges
- How to combine different open source technologies as building blocks
- The design, implementation, and optimization of Alluxio metadata service
ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Alluxio (alluxio.io) is an open-source data orchestration system that provides a single namespace federating multiple external distributed storage systems. It is critical for Alluxio to be able to store and serve the metadata of all files and directories from all mounted external storage both at scale and at speed.
This talk shares our design, implementation, and optimization of Alluxio metadata service (master node) to address the scalability challenges. Particularly, we will focus on how to apply and combine techniques including tiered metadata storage (based on off-heap KV store RocksDB), fine-grained file system inode tree locking scheme, embedded state-replicate machine (based on RAFT), exploration and performance tuning in the correct RPC frameworks (thrift vs gRPC) and etc. As a result of the combined above techniques, Alluxio 2.0 is able to store at least 1 billion files with a significantly reduced memory requirement, serving 3000 workers and 30000 clients concurrently.
In this Office Hour, we will go over how to:
- Metadata storage challenges
- How to combine different open source technologies as building blocks
- The design, implementation, and optimization of Alluxio metadata service
Video:
Slides:
ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Alluxio (alluxio.io) is an open-source data orchestration system that provides a single namespace federating multiple external distributed storage systems. It is critical for Alluxio to be able to store and serve the metadata of all files and directories from all mounted external storage both at scale and at speed.
This talk shares our design, implementation, and optimization of Alluxio metadata service (master node) to address the scalability challenges. Particularly, we will focus on how to apply and combine techniques including tiered metadata storage (based on off-heap KV store RocksDB), fine-grained file system inode tree locking scheme, embedded state-replicate machine (based on RAFT), exploration and performance tuning in the correct RPC frameworks (thrift vs gRPC) and etc. As a result of the combined above techniques, Alluxio 2.0 is able to store at least 1 billion files with a significantly reduced memory requirement, serving 3000 workers and 30000 clients concurrently.
In this Office Hour, we will go over how to:
- Metadata storage challenges
- How to combine different open source technologies as building blocks
- The design, implementation, and optimization of Alluxio metadata service
Video:
Slides:
Videos:
Presentation Slides:
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Videos
In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and machine learning, Platform and Data Infrastructure Teams face critical challenges in building and managing large-scale AI platforms. Performance bottlenecks, scalability of the platform, and scarcity of GPUs pose significant challenges in supporting large-scale model training and serving.
In this talk, we introduce how Alluxio helps Platform and Data Infrastructure teams deliver faster, more scalable platforms to ML Engineering teams developing and training AI models. Alluxio’s highly-distributed cache accelerates AI workloads by eliminating data loading bottlenecks and maximizing GPU utilization. Customers report up to 4x faster training performance with high-speed access to petabytes of data spread across billions of files regardless of persistent storage type or proximity to GPU clusters. Alluxio’s architecture lowers data infrastructure costs, increases GPU utilization, and enables workload portability for navigating GPU scarcity challenges.
In this talk, Zhe Zhang (NVIDIA, ex-Anyscale) introduced Ray and its applications in the LLM and multi-modal AI era. He shared his perspective on ML infrastructure, noting that it presents more unstructured challenges, and recommended using Ray and Alluxio as solutions for increasingly data-intensive multi-modal AI workloads.
As large-scale machine learning becomes increasingly GPU-centric, modern high-performance hardware like NVMe storage and RDMA networks (InfiniBand or specialized NICs) are becoming more widespread. To fully leverage these resources, it’s crucial to build a balanced architecture that avoids GPU underutilization. In this talk, we will explore various strategies to address this challenge by effectively utilizing these advanced hardware components. Specifically, we will present experimental results from building a Kubernetes-native distributed caching layer, utilizing NVMe storage and high-speed RDMA networks to optimize data access for PyTorch training.