Online solutions for scalable file server systems

Abstract

We propose three online algorithms for scalable file server systems. A scalable file server is expected to provide rather stable services while the numbers of users, tasks, and data volumes keep increasing. One of the purposes of parallel and distributed approaches is to achieve scalability. Sufficient hardware resources are essential for good services; however, a good coordination of them is also indispensable, as parallel and distributed resources need to complement the shortages of each other, and it falls on the shoulders of the algorithmic and architectural designs. In this paper, we address the load balancing problem in scalable file servers. The three online approximate algorithms proposed is for placing and deleting documents in a system of M distributed file servers located in a cluster in order to balance the loads and required storage spaces among all servers. In [7], we have proposed some algorithms without allowing re-allocation. In this paper, by paying the re-allocation cost, we have several improvements on some existing results. © 2006 ACM.