History
PVFS was first developed in 1993 by Walt Ligon and Eric Blumer as a parallel file system for Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) as part of a NASA grant to study the I/O patterns of parallel programs. PVFS version 0 was based on Vesta, a parallel file system developed at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Starting in 1994 Rob Ross re-wrote PVFS to use TCP/IP and departed from many of the original Vesta design points. PVFS version 1 was targeted to a cluster of DEC Alpha workstations networked using switched FDDI. Like Vesta, PVFS striped data across multiple servers and allowed I/O requests based on a file view that described a strided access pattern. Unlike Vesta, the striping and view were not dependent on a common record size. Ross' research focused on scheduling of disk I/O when multiple clients were accessing the same file. Previous results had show than scheduling according the best possible disk access pattern was preferable. Ross showed that this depended on a number of factors including the relative speed of the network and the details of the file view. In some cases a scheduling that based on network traffic was preferable, thus a dynamically adaptable schedule provided the best overall performance.
In late 1994 Ligon met with Thomas Sterling and John Dorband at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and discussed their plans to build the first Beowulf computer. It was agreed that PVFS would be ported to Linux and be featured on the new machine. Over the next several years Ligon and Ross worked with the GSFC group including Donald Becker, Dan Ridge, and Eric Hendricks. In 1997 at a cluster meeting in Pasadena, CA Sterling asked that PVFS be released as an open source package.
Read more about this topic: Parallel Virtual File System
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