COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	Mar. 2, 2007
Speaker	Jeremy Stribling (M.I.T.)
Topic	Building Distributed, Wide-Area Applications with WheelFS
Abstract:	It is a challenge to build applications that need to share data and are distributed across hundreds or thousands of computers in a wide-area network (e.g., PlanetLab or on a Grid). In order to cope with high latency, throughput bottlenecks, and temporary failures, such applications typically implement their own storage plan or use special-purpose storage solutions (e.g., DISC, Globus, Carbonite, etc.). Inspired by the success of the Google File System for cluster applications, this proposal investigates whether a general-purpose wide-area file system could simplify building distributed applications. In particular, this talk presents a preliminary design, called WheelFS. WheelFS's goal is to ease the development of distributed applications such as cooperative Web caches, data-intensive Grid applications, and PlanetLab measurements, perhaps reducing the storage management code to a simple script around the application's core logic. Towards this goal, WheelFS adopts many features from existing file systems, and adds two new ones: semantic cues, and write-locally-read-globally. This talk will also discuss several specific applications that can potentially benefit from using WheelFS.

Acknowledgements

We thank the MIT Department of Mathematics, Student Chapter of SIAM, ORCD, and LLSC for their generous support of this series.