Structure and Performance of the Direct Access File System (DAFS)

This paper outlines the fundamental performance characteristics of DAFS and presents experimental results from an open-source DAFS prototype to quantify the performance effects of its key distinguishing protocol features -- asynchronous direct-access operations and low-overhead bulk I/O. Our results characterize the class of workloads that benefit from DAFS, and show that the DAFS structure has potential to address longstanding obstacles to high-performance file services.