GFS saves its file system descriptors in inodes that are allocated dynamically (referred to as dynamic nodes or dinodes). They are placed in a whole file system block (4096 bytes is the standard file system block size in Linux kernels). In a cluster file system, multiple servers access the file system at the same time; hence, the pooling of multiple dinodes in one block would lead to more competitive block accesses and false contention. For space efficiency and reduced disk accesses, file data is saved (stuffed) the dinode itself if the file is small enough to fit completely inside the dinode. In this case, only one block access is necessary to access smaller files. If the files are bigger, GFS uses a “flat file” structure. All pointers in a dinode have the same depth. There are only direct, indirect, or double indirect pointers. The tree height grows as much as necessary to store the file data as shown in Figure 1.

via redhat.com | Data sharing with a GFS storage cluster.