Supporting Insertions and Deletions in Striped Parallel Filesystems

The dramatic improvements in the processing rates of parallel computers are turning many compute-bound jobs into IO-bound jobs. Parallel le systems have been proposed to better match IO throughput to processing power. Many parallel le systems stripe les across numerous disks; each disk has its own controller. A striped le can be appended (or prepended) to and maintain its structure. However, a block can't be inserted into or deleted from the middle of the le, since doing so would destroy the regular striping structure of the le. In this paper, we present a distributed le structure that maintains les in indexed striped extents on a message passing multiprocessor. This approach allows highly parallel random and sequential reads, and also allows insertion and deletion into the middle of the le.