Cluster-aware cache for network attached storage

Abstract

Decentralized, cooperative and large-scale distributed storage systems that consist of a cluster of storage nodes attached with local disks can deliver high resource utilization, high availability and easy scalability. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of a novel Cluster-Aware Cache (CAC) algorithm that shares memories between nodes in cluster to construct an efficient and cooperative cache-to-disk accesses policy. The difference between our scheme and previous studies is that processes on different node can access the same page concurrently. Furthermore, CAC algorithm is also well suited to heterogeneous clusters where one or more nodes may have larger amounts of memory than the others. The performance measurements with a Web server on our system show dramatic performance improvements with increasing number of nodes. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.