Scale and performance in a distributed file system：（规模和性能在一个分布式文件系统）.pdfVIP

Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System JOHN H. HOWARD, MICHAEL L. KAZAR, SHERRI G. MENEES, DAVID A. NICHOLS, M. SATYANARAYANAN, ROBERT N. SIDEBOTHAM, and MICHAEL J. WEST Carnegie Mellon University 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 perform- ance 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. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.4.3 [Operating Systems]: File Systems Management- distributed file systems; D.4.8 [Operating Systems]: Performance-measurements General Terms: Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance Additional Key Words and Phrases: Andrew, caching, operability, scalability, Venus, Vice, Volumes, whole file transfer 1. INTRODUCTION Andrew is a distributed computing environment that has been under development at Carnegie Mellon University since 1983. A comprehensive overview of the system has been presented by Morris et al. [3]. The characteri