Design of an I/O Balancing File System on Web Server Clusters

The paper presents the design of an I/O balancing file system on Web server clusters. High-speed networks allow machines to access remote data nearly as quickly as they can access local data. This trend motivates the introduction of I/O balancing mechanism into cluster file systems. Two effective approaches are issued in the paper: file migration and unique cache. The former is to migrate the files from congested nodes to those uncongested ones to balance the I/O load among the cluster system. And the latter is to integrate the memory and disk cache to form a global memory-disk file cache. It extracts the ideas of cooperative cache and file replication to improve the file system performance. Also unique cache balances the I/O load in file cache level. We can conclude that TH-CluFS is a suitable file system for Web server cluster.