Design and Implementation of the Cooperative Cache for PVFS

Abstract

Abstract.Recently, there have been many efforts to get high performance in cluster computing with inexpensive PCs connected through high-speed networks. Some of them were to provide high bandwidth and parallelism in file service using a distributed file system. Other researches for distributed file systems include the cooperative cache that reduces servers' load and improves overall performance. The cooperative cache shares file caches among clients so that a client can request a file to another client, not to the server, through interclient message passing. In various distributed file systems, PVFS (Parallel Virtual File System) provides high performance with parallel I/O in Linux widely used in cluster computing. However, PVFS doesn't support any file cache facility. This paper describes the design and implementation of the cooperative cache for PVFS (Coopc-PVFS). We show the efficiency of Coopc-PVFS in comparison to original PVFS. As a result, the response time of Coopc-PVFS is shorter than or similar to that of original PVFS.

Design and Implementation of the Home-Based Cooperative Cache for PVFS

“…Because of large overhead to maintain accurate information about cached blocks, we designed Coopc-PVFS as a hint-based cooperative cache [9]. To maintain the hintopened clients list, we added new function to the metadata manager to keep the clients list that contains information of clients that opened the file before.…”

“…There is no file system cache in PVFS -PVFS just supports data transfers from/to I/O servers. For a new file system cache for PVFS, we designed and implemented cooperative cache for PVFS (Coopc-PVFS) [9].…”