CACHING AND WRITEBACK POLICIES IN PARALLEL FILE-SYSTEMS

Improvements in the processing speed of multiprocessors are outpacing improvements in the speed of disk hardware. Parallel disk I/O subsystems have been proposed as one way to close the gap between processor and disk speeds. Such parallel disk systems require parallel file system software to avoid performance-limiting bottlenecks. We discuss cache management techniques that can be used in a parallel file system implementation for multiprocessors with scientific workloads. We examine several write-back policies, and give results of experiments that test their performance. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.