Title: NFS-cc: tuning NFS for concurrent read sharing

Authors: Ying Xu, Brett D. Fleisch

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0304, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0304, USA

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.

Keywords: cooperative caching; network file systems; concurrent read sharing; cluster; distributed file caching; high performance computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2004.008349

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2004 Vol.1 No.4, pp.203 - 213

Published online: 07 Dec 2005 *

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