A Novel Meta-data Synchronous Write Mechanism for Cluster File System

In cluster file system, the meta-data represents the key information of a file. In order to make sure the safety of meta-data, the most of cluster file system write the meta-data to disk as soon as possible to suffer the possible failure of underlying facilities, such as node accidentally crash. The synchronous disk write of meta-data is a performance bottle of cluster file system. This paper presents a high performance cooperative synchronous write mechanism for meta-data: CSWM. CSWM is a pure software mechanism which provides the reliability of synchronous write operations with the performance of asynchronous write operations. The meta-data synchronously witted in CSWM are saved on both two cooperative meta-data server before being written to disk. Then, CSWM can ensure the safety of meta-data and improve the cluster file system performance. The experiments in this paper prove that CSWM can effectively improve the performance of cluster file system.