Performance Evaluation of Intelligent I/O on File Servers

Abstract

The intelligent Input/Output （I2O）architecture is a standard to develop protable device drivers that offloads the host CPU for I/O operations. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of I2O on file servers using the NetBench benchmark. We compare the total throughput of the file server with and without I2O supports. the evaluation results show that t I2O indeed improves throughput of the file server, and allows the server to handle more number of clients. Our evaluation also shows that I2O is especially useful when the server CPU load is heavy.