Cooperative caching in the pCFS parallel cluster file system

This short paper describes the cooperative caching architecture of pCFS [5], a shared disk cluster file system (CFS) which aims to achieve high performance in a broad spectrum of I/O intensive applications ranging from computational access to large data sets to video streaming and databases, and includes an extended API for parallel I/O access. pCFS is targeted at small to medium sized clusters where data is stored in Fibre Channel shared devices on a Storage Area Network (SAN) and exploits two interconnect fabrics: a SAN to access on-disk data, and a LAN, used both for the exchange of control information (related to locking and cache management) and for cooperative caching dataflow.