Abstract
Abstract : A parallel file system is normally used to support excessive file requests from parallel applications in a cluster system, whereas prefetching is useful for improving the file system performance. This paper proposes a table-comparison prefetching policy that is particularly suitable for parallel scientific applications and multimedia web services in a VIA-based parallel file system. VIA relieves the communi-cation overhead of traditional communication protocols, such as TCP/IP. The proposed policy introduces a table-comparison method to predict data for prefetching. In ad-dition, it includes an algorithm to determine whether and when prefetching is performed using the current available I/O bandwidth. Experimental results confirmed that the use of the proposed prefetching policy in a VIA-based parallel file system produced a higher file system performance.