I've seen this through VFS.  Here are some graphs (ignore the pNFS lines)
with 4MB block size and the standard read/write interfaces.
Overview:
http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/asci/pnfs/darkstar-exp/

Single file:
http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/asci/pnfs/darkstar-exp/experiments-5_13095_image001.gif

Separate files:
http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/asci/pnfs/darkstar-exp/experiments-5_15651_image001.gif

As the # of data servers increases, aggregate read performance increases
but individual client read performance suffers a little.

Dean

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Murali Vilayannur wrote:

> Hi Praveen,
> Sorry for the late response. Unfortunately, we have not seen this kind of
> behavior on many of our setups thru the MPI-I/O/ADIO-PVFS2 interfaces.
> It is conceivable that performance thru the VFS do not scale with
> number of servers.
>
> Could you tell us how the file is being read (i.e using what interfaces,
> what block sizes etc)?
> There still aren't that many tweakable settings just yet, but we are
> working on some I/O performance tuning and we will hopefully have a better
> handle on what settings affect performance.
> Thanks for the reports,
> Murali
>
> On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Praveen KJ wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >      We have a pvfs2 client reading a 5 GB file sequentially from
> > multiple pvfs2 data servers.
> >      There is just one metadata server. All the nodes are connected via
> > GigE network.
> >
> >      The problem we are seeing is that the single-client read throughput
> > decreases as the number of servers increase.
> >      With 24 servers we see around 5 MB/s read compared to 50 MB/s read
> > with just 2 servers.
> >      The setup between each experiment is exactly same, except the
> > number of servers.
> >
> >      We have tried a couple of pvfs2 versions including the latest 1.3.1.
> >      Is there any setting we have to tweak ?  We have taken only pvfs2
> > defaults till now.
> >      Some of the relevant options are pasted below.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Praveen
> >
> > ------------------------------------------
> > pvfs2-fs.conf ( except hostnames )
> > ------------------------------------------
> > <Defaults>
> >        UnexpectedRequests 50
> >        LogFile /tmp/pvfs2-server.log
> >        EventLogging none
> >        LogStamp usec
> >        BMIModules bmi_tcp
> >        FlowModules flowproto_multiqueue
> >        PerfUpdateInterval 1000
> >        ServerJobBMITimeoutSecs 30
> >        ServerJobFlowTimeoutSecs 30
> >        ClientJobBMITimeoutSecs 300
> >        ClientJobFlowTimeoutSecs 300
> >        ClientRetryLimit 5
> >        ClientRetryDelayMilliSecs 2000
> > </Defaults>
> >
> > <Filesystem>
> >        Name pvfs2-fs
> >        ID 1175641402
> >        RootHandle 1048576
> >        <StorageHints>
> >                TroveSyncMeta yes
> >                TroveSyncData no
> >                AttrCacheKeywords datafile_handles,metafile_dist
> >                AttrCacheKeywords dir_ent, symlink_target
> >                AttrCacheSize 4093
> >                AttrCacheMaxNumElems 32768
> >        </StorageHints>
> > </Filesystem>
> > _______________________________________________
> > PVFS2-users mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-users
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
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>
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