ABSTRACT

NFSv4 Replication for Grid Storage Middleware
Jiaying Zhang and Peter Honeyman
Proc. 4th International Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing, Melbourne. November 2006.

Sharing data in scientific collaborations that involve many i nstitutions around the world demands a large-scale storage system that is reliable and efficient, yet at the same time, convenient to use. This paper presents a replicated file system that supports mutable replication with strong consistency guarantees, high failure resiliency, and good scaling properties. The principal concern with such a system is usually its performance penalty. Using experiment evaluation, we show that in simulated wide area networks, the proposed replicated file system maintains a significant performance advantage over a single server system. At the same time, it provides comparable and often better performance than GridFTP, the de facto standard file transfer application that is often used to manually synchronize shared data.

Keywords: Mutable replication, Consistency, Global name space, Distributed File System, NFSv4, Grid computing.