Caching and writeback policies in parallel file systems

Improvements in the processing speed of multiprocessors are outpacing improvements in the speed of disk hardware. Parallel disk I/O subsystems have been proposed as one way to close the gap between processor and disk speeds. Such parallel disk systems require parallel file system software to avoid performance-limiting bottlenecks. The authors discuss cache management techniques that can be used in a parallel file system implementation. The authors examine several writeback policies, and give results of experiments that test their performance