Design issues of a cooperative cache with no coherence problems

In this paper, we examine some of the important problems observed in the design of cooperative caches. Solutions to the coherence, load-balancing and fault-tolerance problems are presented. These solutions have been implemented as a part of PAFS, a parallel/distributed file system, and its performance has been compared to the one achieved by xFS. Using the comparison results, we have observed that the proposed ideas not only solve the main problems of cooperative caches, but also increase the overall system performance. Although the solutions presented in this paper were targeted to a parallel machine, reasonable good results have also been obtained for networks of workstations.