Locality and caching in parallel/distributed file systems

[Mark Hahn]

> appreciate any feedback that people can give.  Please forgive my ignorance
> if I turn out to have reinvented the edsel.

well, much of what you describe was in AFS/Coda/Intermezzo.  some of it 
is indeed Edsel-ish, though it's interesting to look at machine balance
then versus now:

	diskSz	diskSp	netSp	memSz	memSP	CPU
then	30MB	1MBps	1MBps	1MB	20MBps	4mips
now	60GB	30MBps	100MBps	1GB	2GBps	4gips
ratio	2000	30	100	1000	100	1000

anyway, the vast increase in local disk/mem/cpu capacity has, unsurprisingly,
made people want to make systems more peer-to-peer.  afaikt, there hasn't 
really been an effective/thorough/general-purpose p2p filesystem, though.