Memory Based Metadata Server for Cluster File Systems

In high performance computing environment, the metadata servers of distributed file system become critical to impact overall system performance. An approach of memory based metadata server is proposed, instead of the disk based approach. We present a metadata management system with matrix organization, non-overhead reliable mechanism and static scalability method, which is design to efficiently utilize large memory and provide high performance. We examine and demonstrate the performance, overhead of reliability and scalability in a test bed environment of 28 machines. The result shows that the performance of our system is higher than other traditional distributed file system, the reliability can be achieved with little overhead and the metadata servers can be linear scaling.