Bigfoot-NFS allows the transparent use of the aggregate space of multiple NFS file servers as a single file system. By presenting a single apparent file system to the user, Bigfoot-NFS allows the use of available storage without the maintenance overhead of tracking multiple mounted file systems. Unlike most other network parallel file systems, Bigfoot-NFS runs without a central “metadata” server that binds a file to its location. Bigfoot-NFS uses vectored remote procedure calls to get reasonable performance with multiple servers while retaining the simplicity of stateless NFS semantics. To date, we have demonstrated Bigfoot-NFS file systems as large as 30 gigabytes spanning 28 nodes. The server currently runs as a user-level process under SunOS. Because of context-switching overhead, Bigfoot-NFS generally runs 2-3x slower than the kernel based implementation of NFS. However, measurements of Bigfoot-NFS show that many file operations still show reasonable performance with increasing numbers of servers, and demonstrate how parallel file systems can be designed without centralized metadata servers.
[1]
David A. Goldberg,et al.
Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem
,
1985,
USENIX Conference Proceedings.
[2]
Randy H. Katz,et al.
Failure correction techniques for large disk arrays
,
1989,
ASPLOS III.
[3]
Darrell D. E. Long,et al.
Swift: Using Distributed Disk Striping to Provide High I/O Data Rates
,
1991,
Comput. Syst..
[4]
Bruce R. Montague.
THE SWIFT/RAID DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTION DRIVER
,
1993
.
[5]
John H. Hartman,et al.
Zebra: A Striped Network File System
,
1992
.
[6]
Mary Baker,et al.
Measurements of a distributed file system
,
1991,
SOSP '91.
[7]
Steve R. Kleiman,et al.
Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX
,
1986,
USENIX Summer.