[Gluster-devel] Improving real world performance by moving files closer to their target workloads

[Luke McGregor]

Hi

Im Luke McGregor and im working on a project at the university of
waikato computer science department to make some improvements to
GLusterFS to improve performance for our specific application. We are
implementing a fairly small cluster (90 machines currently) to use for
large scale computing projects. This machine is being built using
comodity hardware and backended into a gigabit ethernet backbone with
10G uplinks between switches. Each node in the cluster will be
responsible for both storage and workload processing. This is to be
achieved with single sata disks in the machines.

We are currently experimenting with running GLuster over the nodes in
the cluster to produce a single large filesystem. For my Honors
research project ive been asked to look into making some improvements
to GLuster to try to improve performance by moving the files within
the GLusterFS closer to the node which is accessing the file.

What i was wondering is basically how hard would it be to write code
to modify the metadata so that when a file is accessed it is then
moved to the node which it is accessed from and its location is
updated in the metadata.

Any help/advice where to start would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Luke McGregor