Showing papers on "Global Namespace published in 1997"

The Galley parallel file system

Abstract: Most current multiprocessor file systems are designed to use multiple disks in parallel, using the high aggregate bandwidth to meet the growing I/O requirements of parallel scientific applications. Many multiprocessor file systems provide applications with a conventional Unix-like interface, allowing the application to access multiple disks transparently. This interface conceals the parallelism within the file system, increasing the ease of programmability, but making it difficult or impossible for sophisticated programmers and libraries to use knowledge about their I/O needs to exploit that parallelism. In addition to providing an insufficient interface, most current multiprocessor file systems are optimized for a different workload than they are being asked to support. We introduce Galley, a new parallel file system that is intended to efficiently support realistic scientific multiprocessor workloads. We discuss Galley's file structure and application interface, as well as the performance advantages offered by that interface.

An overview of the Internet File System

Abstract: The Internet File System (IFS) extends the scope of file systems from LANs to the Internet, encouraging collaboration and information dissemination on a much broader scale. In addition, Internet resources (e.g. Web pages, Gopher Information, and Network News) become files in IFS, allowing file system APIs and existing tools and commands to be used to manipulate Internet resources just like conventional files. IFS is unique in that it introduces a logical layer between applications and operating systems, and integrates widely-used protocols like FTP, HTTP, GOPHER, NNTP, RSH in this layer. The system is transparent to applications and operating systems, and requires no modification of software nor change in management of Internet file servers. A prototype of IFS is currently running on Sun OS 4.1, Solaris, HP-UX, SVR4, SGI MIPS, and Linux.

The design and implementation of a distributed file system based on shared network storage

Abstract: Distributed file systems allow users to access and share files from any computer connected to the distributed system. Distributed file systems typically do not achieve the same level of performance that local file systems provide due to the demands of resource sharing. For workloads with large storage capacity requirements, poor performance of distributed file systems often overshadows the benefits of transparent file sharing. Traditional network and channel interfaces differ in performance, connectivity, and connection distance. By merging network and channel interfaces, resulting interfaces allow multiple computers to physically share storage devices. Computers service local file requests directly from network attached storage devices. Direct device access eliminates server machines as bottlenecks to performance and availability. Communication is unnecessary between computers, since each machine views storage as locally attached. This dissertation presents a distributed file system design based on a shared network storage architecture. The architecture distributes user workloads and file system resources across the entire system. Functions once performed by server computers are redistributed to clients and storage devices. The design brings responsibilities, such as caching and consistency management, closer to hardware, so that these functions execute faster and more reliably. The Global File System (GFS) is a distributed file system prototype built upon Fibre Channel networks. GFS is implemented in the Silicon Graphics IRIX operating system and is accessed using standard UNIX commands and utilities. GFS uses a consistency mechanism that is prototyped on Seagate disk drives and Ciprico disk arrays. This dissertation describes the architecture and implementation of the file system design. Performance analysis is given for the file system prototype in large data demand environments.

Level Programming with High Performance: The Illinois Concert System

Abstract: Programmers of concurrent applications are faced with a complex pe flormance space in which data distribution and concurrency management exacerbate the dificulty of building large, complex applications. To address these challenges, the Illinois Concert system provides a global namespace, implicit concurrency control and granularity management, implicit storage management, and object-oriented programming features. These features are embodied in a language ICC+ i- (derived from C+ +) which has been used to build a number of kernels and applications. As high level features can potentially incur overhead, the Concert system employs a range of compiler and runtime optimization techniques to eficiently support the high level programming model. The compiler techniques include type inference, inlining and specialization; and the runtime techniques include caching, prefetching and hybrid stacWheap multithreading. The effectiveness of these techniques permits the construction of complex parallel applications that are jexible, enabling convenient application modification or tuning. We present peflormance results for a number of application programs which attain good speedups and absolute pe flormance.