Here are a few articles that may be of interest:

• Thread clustering: sharing-aware scheduling on SMP-CMP-SMT multiprocessors, by David Tam, Reza Azimi, Michael Stumm

  Talks about impact of scheduling on multi-core machines in SMP and CPU affinity

• hFS: a hybrid file system prototype for improving small file and metadata performance, by Zhihui Zhang, Kanad Ghose

  Introduces a FreeBSD-based implementation of a mixture between FFS (for in-place metadata updating) and LFS (for out-of-place metadata updating). Includes performance measures against a port of NetBSD's LFS.

• Competitive prefetching for concurrent sequential I/O, by Chuanpeng Li, Kai Shen, Athanasios E. Papathanasiou

  How to detect and handle IO balancing. May be of interest WRT last and this year's "QoS" Summer-of-Code project.

• Dynamic and adaptive updates of non-quiescent subsystems in commodity operating system kernels, by Kristis Makris, Kyung Dong Ryu

  Having kernel modules is one thing, being able to replace subsystems that are in use is a different problem, solved here. Shows how to replace like functions, and subsystems like a full scheduler while running. Impressive!

• Antiquity: exploiting a secure log for wide-area distributed storage, by Hakim Weatherspoon, Patrick Eaton, Byung-Gon Chun, John Kubiatowicz

  Possible, BSD-licensed alternative to existing distributed file systems (NFS, Coda) that's designed to handle failure of arbitrary machines. Code is available from http://antiquity.sourceforge.net/.