I recently was involved in some development work for a quasi-parallel filesystem for Microsoft Windows. As a result of that involvement my interest was piqued and I decided to do so research on what the state of research and development is in the field of parallel filesystems designed specifically for Microsoft Windows.
First a quick review of what I mean by a parallel file system. There are any number of different types of parallel file systems available. Some allow multiple systems and applications to share common pools of storage as in a clusered filesystem. Some split the data across two or more nodes to improve access time and redundancy. Other variants split files into lots of small chunks, stores these chunks on different disks in a round-robin fashion, and re-combine them upon reading to get back the original file.
The earliest instance of Microsoft Windows-specific parallel fileystem that I have found to date is the parallel filesystem developed by the ARGOS group at Universidad Carlos 111 de Madrid, Madrid, ES. This research group developed a prototype of a parallel file system for a network of Microsft Windows nodes which they called WinPFS. They presented their work at COSET 2004 and a number of other workshops. WinPFS was implemented as a new fileyystem type fully integrated within the Microsoft Windows kernel. This has the advantage that no modification or recompilation of user applications is needed to take advantage of the parallel filesystem.
The goal of this research group was to build a parallel file system for networks of Microsoft Windows computers using Microsoft Windows shared folders to access remote data in parallel. The implementation is based on file system redirectors which redirect requests to remote nodes using UNC (Universal Naming Convention) and the SMB and/or CIFS protocols. WinPFS is registered as a virtual remote file system and access to remote data is through a new shared folder \\PFS. The basic file operation primatives are: create, read, write, and create directory.
The prototype was developed on the Windows XP platform, and has been tested with a cluster of seven Windows XP nodes and a Windows 2003 Server node in various configurations. Maximum throughput for write operations were 250 Mbit/s and 1200 Mbit/s for read operations. The research team reported that the bottleneck for writes was the disks and for reads was the network. As far as I can tell this