Standardizing Storage Clusters: Will pNFS become the new standard for parallel data access?

This article discusses pNFS (parallel NFS), a protocol that is being standardized as part of the NFSv4.1 specification to bridge the gap between current NFS protocols and parallel cluster file system interfaces.

Data-intensive applications such as data mining, movie animation, oil and gas exploration, and weather modeling generate and process huge amounts of data. File-data access throughput is critical for good performance. To scale well, these HPC (high-performance computing) applications distribute their computation among numerous client machines. HPC clusters can range from hundreds to thousands of clients with aggregate I/O demands ranging into the tens of gigabytes per second.

In ACM Queue magazine, Volume 5, Issue 6, pages 20–27, 2007

Resources

The author’s version of the paper is attached to this posting, please observe the following copyright:© ACM, 2007. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Queue magazine, Vol. 5, No. 6 – September/October 2007, https://queue.acm.org/issuedetail.cfm?issue=1317394

The definitive version of the paper can be found at: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1317402login-pnfs.pdf