Evaluating the performance of the dNFSP file system

Parallel I/O in cluster computing is one of the most important issues to be tackled as clusters grow larger and larger. Many solutions have been proposed for the problem and, while effective in terms of performance, they usually represent a considerable amount of hacking into a "traditional" Beowulf cluster installation. In this paper, we investigate a parallel solution based on NFS, which reduces the level of intrusion in the file server installation, keeps the client side untouched, and still provides an improved level of performance and scalability for parallel applications. We compare our proposal to other existing file systems using known benchmarks, and demonstrate that it is a valid alternative for general-purpose cluster computing.