GMount: An Ad Hoc and Locality-Aware Distributed File System by Using SSH and FUSE

Developing and deploying distributed file system has been important for the Grid computing. By GMount, non-privileged users can instantaneously and effortlessly build a distributed file system on arbitrary machines that are reachable via SSH. It is scalable to hundreds of nodes in the wide-area Grid environments and adapts to NAT/Firewall. Unlike conventional distributed file systems, GMount can directly harness local file systems of each node without importing/exporting application data and utilize the network topology to make the metadata operations locality-aware. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of GMount by using two popular modules: SSH and FUSE. We demonstrate its viability and locality-aware metadata operation performance in a large scale Grid with over 320 nodes spreading across 12 clusters that are connected by heterogeneous wide-area links.