Performance analysis of distributed file systems with non-volatile caches

The authors study the use of non-volatile memory for caching in distributed file systems. This provides an advantage over traditional distributed file systems in that the load is reduced at the server without making the data vulnerable to failures. They show that small non-volatile write caches at the clients and the server are quite effective. They reduce the write response time and the load on the file server dramatically, thus improving the scalability of the system. They show that a proposed threshold based writeback policy is more effective than a periodic writeback policy. They use a synthetic workload developed from analysis of file I/O traces from commercial production systems. The study is based on a detailed simulation of the distributed environment. The service times for the resources of the system were derived from measurements performed on a typical workstation