1. A method for facilitating access to data in a wide area network, comprising: maintaining a scalable multi-node file system cache in a local cluster file system including multiple computing nodes; caching local file data in the cache by fetching file data on demand from a remote cluster file system into the cache over the network, wherein the local file data corresponds to file data in the remote cluster file system and the local namespace emulates the remote namespace; and performing directory traversal of the cache for the remote cluster file system by creating a local directory structure on demand.