Bridging Local and Wide Area Networks for Overlay Distributed File Systems

In metacomputing and grid computing, a computational job may execute on a node that is geographically far away from its data files. In such a situation, some of the issues to be resolved are: First, how can the job access its data? Second, how can the high latency and low bandwidth bottlenecks of typical wide-area networks (WANs) be tolerated? Third, how can the deployment of distributed file systems be made easier? The Trellis Network File System (Trellis NFS) uses a simple, global namespace to provide basic remote data access. Data from any node accessible by Secure Copy can be opened like a file. Aggressive caching strategies for file data and metadata can greatly improve performance across WANs. And, by using a bridging strategy between the well-known Network File System (NFS) and wide-area protocols, the deployment is greatly simplified