Data allocation and load balancing for heterogeneous cluster storage systems

Distributed filesystems are a typical solution in networked environments as clusters and grids. Parallel filesystems are a typical solution in order to reach high performance I/O distributed environment, but those filesystems have some limitations in heterogeneous storage systems. Usually in distributed systems, load balancing is used as a solution to improve the performance, but typically the distribution is made between peer-to-peer computational resources and from the processor point of view. In heterogeneous systems, like heterogeneous clusters of workstations, the existing solutions do not work so well. However, the utilization of those systems is more extended every day, having an extreme example in the grid environment. In this paper we bring attention to those aspects of heterogeneous distributed data systems presenting a parallel file system that take into account heterogeneity of storage nodes, the dynamic addition of new storage nodes, and an algorithm to group requests in heterogeneous systems.