Optimizing remote file access for parallel and distributed network applications

This paper presents a paradigm for remote file access called Smart File Obj ects (SFOs). The SFO is a realization of the ELFS (Extensible File Systems) concept of files as typed objects, but it is applied to wide-area networks (J. Karpovich et al., in "Proceedings of the 9th OOPLSA," 1994). The SFO i s an object-oriented application-specific file access paradigm designed to address the bottleneck imposed by high latency, low bandwidth, unpredictabl e, and unreliable networks such as the current Internet, Newly emerging net work applications such as multimedia, metacomputing, and collaboratories wi ll have different sensitivities to these network "features." These applicat ions will require a more flexible file access mechanism than what is provid ed by conventional distributed file systems. The SFO uses application and n etwork information to adaptively prefetch and cache needed data in parallel with the execution of the application to mitigate the impact of the networ k. Preliminary results indicate that the SFO can provide substantial perfor mance gains for network applications. (C) 2001 Academic Press.