A parallel file system is normally used to support excessive file requests from parallel applications in a cluster system, whereas prefetching is useful for improving the file system performance. This paper proposes dynamic file prefetching scheme based on file access patterns, named table-comparison prefetching policy, that is particularly suitable for parallel scientific applications and multimedia web services in a VIA-based parallel file system. VIA relieves the communication overhead of traditional communication protocols, such as TCP/IP. The proposed policy introduces a table-comparison method to predict data for prefetching. In addition, it includes an algorithm to determine whether and when prefetching is performed using the current available I/O bandwidth. Experimental results confirmed that the use of the proposed prefetching policy in a VIA-based parallel file system produced a higher file system performance for various file access patterns.