I was reading the Google Bigtable paper and stumbled upon this word chunk server used in Google File System. So I wanted to know is there any difference in chunk server and simply a server.
Thanks in advance!
The Wikipedia article about the Google File System explains the role of the Chunk Server in detail. The short answer is, no, there's not really a difference.
Chunk Servers are/(were) just like any other servers, but simply taking on the specific role of serving fixed size chunks or blobs of data. The servers were provisioned, configured and optimized accordingly: