NFS-cc: tuning NFS for concurrent read sharing
by Ying Xu, Brett D. Fleisch
International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (IJHPCN), Vol. 1, No. 4, 2004

Abstract: A common file access pattern found in cluster applications is concurrent read sharing: applications running on multiple sites read access the same data set concurrently. Traditional network file systems are limited by the server's network bandwidth; therefore, it cannot satisfy the high-bandwidth concurrent reads that cluster applications typically require. This paper presents NFS-cc; a cooperative caching file system based on NFS and optimised for concurrent read sharing. Cooperative caching used by NFS-cc is a distributed file caching scheme, which allows file system clients to read data from the memory of other clients, instead of the server. If multiple clients cache the same data, they can supply the data to other clients concurrently, which greatly reduces the contention for the server's network bandwidth. NFS-cc exploits clients' bandwidth and file caches to improve the aggregate read throughput of the file system. Our preliminary performance measurements show that the aggregate read throughput of NFS-cc was increased with the number of clients and reached as high as 42.6 MB/s with 12 clients connected by a fast Ethernet. NFS-cc also reduced the average block read time by a factor of 50–80% under a variety of concurrent read access patterns when compared with NFS.

Online publication date: Wed, 07-Dec-2005

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (IJHPCN):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

Username:        Password:          Forgotten your password?

Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com