Supporting insertions and deletions in striped parallel filesystems

Abstract

The dramatic improvements in the processing rates of parallel computers are turning many compute-bound jobs into IO-bound jobs. Parallel file systems have been proposed to better match IO throughput to processing power. Many parallel file systems stripe files across numerous disks; each disk has its own controller. A striped file can be appended (or prepended) to and maintain its structure. However, a block can't be inserted into or deleted from the middle of the file, since this would destroy the round robin striping structure of the file. The author presents a distributed file structure that maintains files in indexed striped extents on a message passing multiprocessor. This approach allows highly parallel random and sequential reads, and also allows insertion and deletion into the middle of the file.<>