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
