BFXM: a parallel file system model based on the mechanism of distributed shared memory

This paper proposes a parallel file system model under NOWs (network of workstations) environment. According to the features of NOWs, the system incorporates the mechanism of distributed shared memory, particularly the mechanism of COMA (cache only memory access). It links the memory of all nodes into a large cache; each node aggressively uses not only the local memory but also the remote memory of other nodes, which expedites the data accesses dramatically. It also accesses disks in parallel to improve I/O performance. Furthermore, in our model, data are shared naturally and conveniently among nodes as opposed to the traditional parallel file systems. The architecture of the parallel file system and its detailed implementation, such as file read and write, data replacement, file data dissipation, parallel file read and write are presented in this paper.