Distributed File Systems
My Master Thesis Abstract
We begin with a discussion of some of the main characteristics of
Distributed File Systems, namely locality, name space, cache, consistency,
replication, availability, scalability, heterogeneity, fault tolerance and
security. We analyze several file systems based on these characteristics. We
focus mainly on NFS, Andrew, Coda, Sprite, Log-Structured Sprite, Zebra,
Harp, Frolic, and Echo.
We then describe some analytical models of the behavior of distributed file
systems. After that we present a new model of systems based on
leases - a mechanism to assure consistency on a distributed system. Finally
we describe our implementation of the SODA distributed file system - which
uses leases - presenting some results of its performance.
If you can read Portuguese, you may get my
Master Thesis (418K gzipped postscript file).
The SODA Distributed File System
SODA is a distributed file system based on leases which offers
consistent distributed file service for the LINUX operating system. It is
still under development but can already be used for research purposes. Feel
free to send me a message if you are interested on it. Help and work from
programmers are also welcome.
See also:
Kon, Fabio and Mandel, Arnaldo. SODA: A
Lease-Based Consistent Distributed File System. Proceedings of the 13th
Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks, 1995 (Prize for best Masters
student paper).
Distributed File Systems Past, Present and Future
I wrote a DFS survey in March/96.
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