Proceedings 13th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS). September 26 - 29, Atlanta, GA.
Raja R. Sambasivan, Andrew J. Klosterman, Gregory R. Ganger
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Layered clustering offers cluster-like load balancing for unmodified NFS or CIFS servers. Read requests sent to a busy server can be offloaded to other servers holding replicas of the accessed files. This paper explores a key design question for this approach: which files should be replicated? We find that the popular policy of replicating readonly files offers little benefit. A policy that replicates readonly portions of read-mostly files, however, implicitly coordinates with client cache invalidations and thereby allows almost all read operations to be offloaded. In a read-heavy trace, 75% of all operations and 52% of all data transfers can be offloaded.
FULL PAPER: pdf