Evaluation of Design Alternatives for a Cluster File System

Based on implementation experience and measurements, this paper presents an evaluation of design alternatives to a cluster file system. The file system is targeted for IBM cluster systems, Scalable POWERparallel and AIX HACMP/600. We considered a shared disk approach where serialized, multiple instances of a single-system file system directly access file data as disk blocks, and a shared file system approach which is the conventional method of distributing file system function between a client and a server. We conclude that the shared disk approach suffers formt eh difficulties of metadata serialization, pooor write-sharing performance, and read throughput.