A High-Performance GriFTP Server at Desktop Cost

The authors prototype a storage system that provides the access performance of a well-endowed GridFTP deployment (e.g., using a cluster and a parallel file-system) at the modest cost of single desktop. To this end, they integrate GridFTP and a combination of dedicated but low-bandwidth (thus cheap) storage nodes and scavenged storage from LAN-connected desktops that participate intermittently to the storage pool. The main advantage of this setup is that it alleviates the server I/O access bottleneck. Additionally, the specific data access pattern of GridFTP, that is, the fact that data accesses are mostly sequential, allows for optimizations that result in a high-performance storage system.