Title: Parallel NFS implementation for an Object based Storage Backend Author: Rahul Iyer The traditional model of Distributed Filesystems involves having a central File server that exports a filesystem to a number of clients. This is the model followed by NFS as well. While this model has been extremely successful, it has begun to have problems keeping up to today?s workloads. The reason for this is, in part the increasing bandwidth of the network. The network is no longer the bottleneck in the current setup. The NFS server has finite resources in terms of CPU, memory etc. As a result, when placed in an environment where the network is fast enough, this server becomes the bottleneck. Parallel NFS, or pNFS, aims to remedy this problem. The goal of pNFS is to eliminate the server bottleneck and let the bandwidth of the storage system scale with the *total aggregate bandwidth of the disks*. In order to do this, pNFS hands the clients a LAYOUT, which is, a description of how a particular file is stored on the storage devices. Using this information, the clients can directly talk to the storage devices, thus avoiding the central server on the Data Path. Currently, there is no implementation of pNFS for object based storage back ends. Ursa Minor, a project at Carnegie Mellon's Parallel Data Lab, is a storage system that uses object based storage devices. One of its interfaces to clients is an NFSv3 server. I propose to make the server pNFS compliant. As evaluation, I propose to show that the central NFS server can become a bottleneck and that making it pNFS compliant enables it to scale with the total aggregate bandwidth offered by Ursa Minor.