On Apr 13, 2010, at 10:12 AM, shruti jain wrote: > The project aims at developing a system which would use collaborative caching > techniques to improve the read accesses in OpenAFS. This project is based on > two observations. > > Firstly, in a cluster environment, a large number of clients need same > datasets to work on i.e. the data on which client nodes need to execute is > same for many other nodes on the network. Currently, each client contacts the > server individually to fetch the data. This increase load on the server > unnecessarily. If the size of the file is very large then the problem would > be highly magnified. > > Second observation is that the local bandwidth are mostly fast and runs into > Gbps. In a cluster, many clients would share the same geography and thus have > fast interconnects between them. The server might be connected through a slow > network link. In this situation, accessing data from another client would be > much faster than accessing data from server itself. > Just one guy's opinion, but I like this. The more I think about it, the more I like it.
One long-term benefit of this is in clusters. We've seen a number of instances where folks have attempted to use AFS as if it were a clustered file system, keeping various lockfiles, etc in the fs. It beat the hell out of our AFS servers when it happened. If a fs could delegate responsibility for such lockfiles to a local node, it's make that sort of thing feasible and fast. Steve
