Parallel File Systems Seminar paper ”Hot Topics in Operating Systems” Communication and Operating Systems Group

With the massive decrease in hardware costs over the last few years, the popularity of Beowulf Clusters has risen to a new high. A consequence has been an in-creasing cluster size (in number of nodes). Therefore the performance of the file system has become a crit-ical point in any parallel computing scenario because the file system has to match the increased computing power. Another issue is the waste of disk space. The hard drives available on the cluster nodes are only used for the system and temporary files, thus wast-ing a lot of space (several TiB on large clusters!). This paper gives an overview of NFSP, a file system that aims to solve both problems. We will have an in depth look at the development process of NFSP and its extensions, also giving performance analysis