Distributed file access (session overview)

Distributed file access is a key aspect of distributed system design. The ease and the efficiency with which files on remote machines can be accessed has a very pervasive influence on the overall success and acceptance of a distributed system. Careful design is required to achieve these goals. Techniques for efficient remote file access are therefore an area of active research.

The papers in this session provide quite a diverse sampling of recent efforts in the construction and the evaluation of distributed file systems. The paper by David Cheriton and Paul Roy describes the design and the performance of a file server supporting a collection of diskless workstations connected by a local area network. A much more loosely coupled environment is described by Peter Weinberger: His paper discusses the integration of a number of independently administered UNIX^† machines into a network-wide file system. Finally, Paul Leach presents an evaluation of a commercial system based on a network-wide single level store.