A locking protocol for a distributed computing environment

Abstract

The need for distributed file systems has been growing for decades to provide clients with efficient and scalable high-performance accesses to stored data. The clients physically share storage devices connected via a network like GigaEthernet or Fibre Channel and, on those clients, distributed file systems take responsibility for providing coordinated accesses and consistent views of shared data. In such a distributed computing environment, one of the major issues affecting in achieving substantial I/O performance and scalability is to build an efficient locking protocol. In this paper, we present a distributed locking protocol that enables multiple nodes to simultaneously write their data to distinct data portions of a file, while providing the consistent view of client cached data, and conclude with an evaluation of the performance of our locking protocol. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.