International Business Machines Corporation

Joan Marie Ries

David L Johnson

Richard Michael Theis

Michael Lawrence Nordstrom

Embodiments of the invention provide a method for assigning a home node to a file system object and using information associated with file system objects to improve locality of reference during thread execution. Doing so may improve application performance on a computer system configured using a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture. Thus, embodiments of the invention allow a computer system to create a nodal affinity between a given file system object and a given processing node.

File system object node management

A dynamic block transfer size adjustment mechanism independently defines block transfer size for each memory portion, which may include files in a file system, virtual storage segments in a memory system, or extents in physical storage. By specifying block transfer size for a memory portion independently from other memory portions, the performance of the computer system may be enhanced. In addition, the block transfer size of one or more memory portions may be dynamically adjusted according to how the memory portion is used. In an alternative embodiment, the block transfer size may also be specified for each process that accesses a portion of memory. Thus, a single file may be accessed with a first block transfer size by a first process, and may be accessed with a second (different) block transfer size by a second process. By providing the ability to independently set block transfer size for portions of memory, and to dynamically adjust those values according to the historical use of the portion of memory, the performance of a computer system is enhanced.

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Oronoco, MN, United States of America

Joan Marie Ries