Client cache for PVFS2

Abstract

Engineering and scientific applications usually require to manage large quantities of data with different programs. The I/O demands of these applications get higher as they get larger because processor and memory speed increase. In order to improve performance and make programming much easier these applications can use parallel file systems. The relation between performance and easiness of programming can be additionally improved by using caches in clients. PVFS is a free parallel file system developed by a multi-institution team of parallel I/O, networking and storage experts. This work proposes a cache in the second version of PVFS in order to improve performance of data-intensive applications with several programs and to improve performance in a parallel program without modifying it to take advantage of the several cores in a processor. We analyze the performance of the cache implementation.