Smart File Objects: A remote file access paradigm

This paper describes a new scheme for remote file access called Smart File Objects (SFO). The SFO is an object-oriented application-specific file access paradigm designed to attack the bottleneck imposed by high latency, low bandwidth networks such as wide-area and wireless networks. The SFO uses application and network information to adaptively prefetch needed data in parallel with the execution of the application. The SFO can offer additional advantages such as non-blocking I/O, bulk I/O, improved file access APIs, and increased reliability. We describe the SFO concept, a prototype implementation in the Mentat system and the results obtained with a distributed gene sequence application running across the Internet and vBNS. The results show the potential of the SFO approach to improve application performance.