Scale and performance in a distributed file system

Scale and performance in a distributed file system (1988)

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by John H. Howard , Michael L. Kazar , Sherri G. Menees , A. Nichols , M. Satyanarayanan , Robert N. Sidebotham , Michael J. West

Venue:	ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Citations:	928 - 47 self

BibTeX

@ARTICLE{Howard88scaleand,
    author = {John H. Howard and Michael L. Kazar and Sherri G. Menees and A. Nichols and M. Satyanarayanan and Robert N. Sidebotham and Michael J. West},
    title = {Scale and performance in a distributed file system},
    journal = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems},
    year = {1988},
    pages = {51--81}
}

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Abstract

The Andrew File System is a location-transparent distributed tile system that will eventually span more than 5000 workstations at Carnegie Mellon University. Large scale affects performance and complicates system operation. In this paper we present observations of a prototype implementation, motivate changes in the areas of cache validation, server process structure, name translation, and low-level storage representation, and quantitatively demonstrate Andrew’s ability to scale gracefully. We establish the importance of whole-file transfer and caching in Andrew by comparing its performance with that of Sun Microsystem’s NFS tile system. We also show how the aggregation of files into volumes improves the operability of the system.

Keyphrases

file system andrew file system whole-file transfer large scale affect performance present observation server process structure motivate change tile system cache validation prototype implementation carnegie mellon university complicates system operation demonstrate andrew ability name translation low-level storage representation sun microsystem nfs tile system