sfs: A Parallel File System for the CM-5
Susan J. LoVerso, Marshall Isman, Andy Nanopoulos,
William Nesheim, Ewan D. Milne, and Richard Wheeler
CM-5 Operating System Group
Thinking Machines Corporation
245 First Street
Cambridge, MA 02142-1264
Abstract
This paper describes the creation of a Unix-compatible file system
with highly scalable performance and size. The file system is on the
CM-5 backed by a scalable array of disks. Using the Unix file system
(UFS) from the SunOS 4.1.2 kernel as a base and modifying it to
support Connection Machine (CM) operations, we have created a new file
system, the scalable file system, or sfs. We discuss the CM operations
we support, such as parallel reads and writes to the processing nodes
of the Connection Machine, the use of NFS to support many partitions
of processing nodes on the CM, support for very large file sizes
(64-bit) and support for odd numbers of disk drives. The tradeoffs and
decisions made during the course of this project as well as
performance data for varying numbers of disk drives are provided.
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