Building a Portable File System for Heterogeneous Clusters

Existing in-kernel distributed file systems cannot cope with the higher requirements in well-equipped cluster environments, especially when the system becomes larger and inevitably heterogeneous. TH-CluFS is a cluster file system designed for large heterogeneous systems. TH-CluFS is implemented completely in the user space by emulating the network file system (NFS) V2 server, and is easily portable to other portable operating system interface (POSIX)-compliant platforms with application programming/binary interface API/ABI compliance. In addition, TH-CluFS uses a serverless architecture which flexibly distributes data at file granularity and achieves a consistent file system view from distributed metadata. The global cache makes full use of the aggregated memories and disks in the cluster to optimize system performance. Experimental results suggest that although TH-CluFS is implemented as user-level components, it functions as a portable, single system image, and scalable cluster file system with acceptable performance sacrifices.