CWCNFS: a cluster NFS server with cooperative write mechanism

Cluster technology can organize many cheap computers to cluster, and obtain the high performance. The traditional cluster file systems can achieve high performance, but most of them require modifying the software of client. This requirement makes these systems lose flexibility and can not be widely applied. This paper provides a novel network file server (NFS) cluster server: CWCNFS, which uses cooperative write mechanism (CWM). CWM is a novel mechanism presented in this paper, which can improve the performance of synchronous write in cluster file system. CWCNFS has following features: (1) CWCNFS unitizes the advantage of cluster file system, and then can adequately use the network bandwidth and the storage capability; (2) CWCNFS applies cooperative write mechanism on the cluster file system, and can greatly improve the performance; (3) CWCNFS can give normal NFS access interface to clients and do not require any software modification of clients. In this paper, the architecture of CWCNFS and the design of CWM are presented. At last, we take some experiments to validate the performance of CWCNFS. The experiment results show that CWCNFS cannot only inherit the universality of NFS, but also can provide high performance NIPS Me service.