An optimized NFS implementation for an SPMD parallel environment

This article presents an environment which supplies UNIX network and file-server services for a standalone single program multiple data (SPMD) programming environment running on a parallel machine. Networking services are accessed via a BSD socket-like interface on each node of the parallel machine, which provides access to a full UDP/IP protocol implementation residing on a custom-designed I/O node. An experimental SPMD NFS client system was developed which supports the standard UNIX file-system interface, implementing a fully dynamic NFS remote mount mechanism and an innovative caching scheme on each node. As a practical demonstration of the usability of this environment, a "real-world" file indexing application was successfully ported and parallelised.