GMount: Build your grid file system on the fly

By GMount, non-privilege users can easily and quickly build ad-hoc distributed file systems on any machines reachable via SSH. In the wide-area Grid environments, it can scale to hundreds of nodes and works with NAT or firewall. Given the network topology, the metadata operations of file system are locality-aware. GMount can be effortlessly deployed in multiple clusters without superuser privilege. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of GMount, and shows its viability in a large scale Grid platform with over 300 nodes spread across 11 clusters.