A Distributed File System for a Wide-Area High Performance Computing Infrastructure

We describe our work in implementing a wide-area distributed file system for the NSF TeraGrid. The system, called XUFS, allows private distributed name spaces to be created for transparent access to personal files across over 9000 computer nodes. XUFS builds on many principles from prior distributed file systems research, but extends key design goals to support the workflow of computational science researchers. Specifically, XUFS supports file access from the desktop to the wide-area network seamlessly, survives transient disconnected operations robustly, and demonstrates comparable or better throughput than some current high performance file systems on the wide-area network.