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RAMA: An easy-to-use high-performance parallel file system


Author(s) : Randy H. Katz Ethan L. Miller, 
Publisher : N/A
Publication Date : 1997
ISSN : N/A
Abstract : Modern massively parallel file systems provide high bandwidth file access by striping files across arrays of disks attached to a few specialized I/O nodes. However, these file systems are hard to use and difficult to integrate with workstations and tertiary storage. RAMA addresses these problems by providing a high-performance massively parallel file system with a simple interface. RAMA uses hashing to pseudo-randomly distribute data to all of its disks, insuring high bandwidth regardless of access pattern and eliminating bottlenecks in file block accesses. This flexibility does not cause a large loss of performance ? RAMA?s simulated performance is within 10-15 % of the optimum performance of a similarly-sized striped file system, and is a factor of 4 or more better than a striped file system with poorly laid out data.,