• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.259-273
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• 2009

Most of large-scale distributed file systems decouple a metadata operation from read and write operations for a file. In the distributed file systems, a certain server named a metadata server (MDS) maintains metadata information in file system such as access information for a file, the position of a file in the repository, the namespace of the file system, and so on. But, the existing systems used restrictive metadata management schemes, because most of the distributed file systems designed to focus on the distributed management and the input/output performance of data rather than the metadata. Therefore, in the existing systems, the metadata throughput and expandability of the metadata server are limited. In this paper, we propose a new non-shared metadata management scheme in order to provide the high metadata throughput and scalability for a cluster of MDSs. First, we derive a dictionary partitioning scheme as a new metadata distribution technique. Then, we present a load balancing technique based on the distribution technique. It is shown through various experiments that our scheme outperforms existing metadata management schemes in terms of scalability and load balancing.