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 and metadata corresponds to the file data and metadata in the remote cluster file system, respectively; asynchronously committing local file information from the cache to the remote cluster file system over the network; and for dependent metadata operations: detecting potential interdependency between objects of a set of update requests; and upon detecting that the data objects are interdependent, asynchronously servicing the update requests in the order in which they were executed on the application nodes.