bof abstract

Leader(s): Peter Honeyman, University of Michigan; Garth A. Gibson,
Carnegie Mellon, Panasas

Parallel NFS is a key component of the emerging NFS version 4 minor version 1 (NFSv4.1). The protocol definition for this draft standard will be complete or near complete at the time of this BOF and a primary use case is large-scale cluster computing and supercomputing. This BOF will discuss the emerging standard protocol, the status of its implementations, its potential implications for the SC community and how the community can get more involved.

Parallel NFS (pNFS) extends NFSv4 to allow clients direct access to file, object, or block storage while preserving the operating system and hardware platform independence features of NFSv4. pNFS can distribute I/O across the bisectional bandwidth of the storage network connecting clients and storage devices, removing the single server bottleneck that plagues client/server-based systems.

For more information on this BOF, see the protocol draft at
www.ietf.org/html.charters/nfsv4-charter.html.