An expandable parallel file system using NFS servers

Abstract

This paper describes a new parallel file system, called Expand (Expandable Parallel File System)1, that is based on NFS servers. Expand allows the transparent use of multiple NFS servers as a single file system. The different NFS servers are combined to create a distributed partition where files are declustered. Expand requires no changes to the NFS server and uses RPC operations to provide parallel access to the same file. Expand is also independent of the clients, because all operations are implemented using RPC and NFS protocol. Using this system, we can join heterogeneous servers (Linux, Solaris, Windows 2000, etc.) to provide a parallel and distributed partition. The paper describes the design of Expand and the evaluation of a prototype of Expand. This evaluation has been made in Linux clusters and compares Expand, NFS and PVFS. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.