Striping Cache: A Global Cache for Striped Network File System

摘要

Using caching to enhance performance has been widely used in the computer system. This is still true in the distributed paradigm. In the distributed environment, caches are distributed in each of the nodes and can be collected to form a global cache. However, the overall performance cannot benefit from the global cache without efficient cooperation of these global resources. The local file system in each node knows nothing about a stripe and thus can not benefit from the related blocks of a stripe. We propose a striping cache (SC) which knows the related blocks of a stripe and can use them to improve the performance of a striped network file system. This high level cache can benefit from previous reads and can aggregate small writes to improve the overall performance. We implement this mechanism in our reliable parallel file system (RPFS). The experimental results show that both read and write performance can be improved with SC support. The improvement comes from the fact that we can reduce the number of disk accesses by employing SC.