The Design and Performance of a Shared Disk File System for IRIX
Steve Soltis, Grant Erickson, Kenneth W. Preslan, Matthew T. O'Keefe · 1998
: In this paper we present a new storage architecture for clusters that creates a shared memory of disk storage that is uniformly accessible to all cluster clients, scales to large capacity, and provides very high performance and connectivity. The cluster structure resembles a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) in that clients (processors) can access disk data (memory) across a local area network like Fibre Channel (a bus or other interconnection network). All clients can see and access the same disk data with perfect consistency. Our approach avoids buffer copy overheads and server bottlenecks found in traditional file systems while scaling to potentially large numbers of clients and large capacity disk systems. We provide a description of the basic file system design, our current implementation on SGI IRIX operating system, and detailed benchmarking and performance analysis results. Good speedup and throughput is achieved for large files across 3 clients and 4 high performance disk arra...