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JetFile
Distributed file system design and implementation
"The design of a worldwide, fully transparent distributed file system
for simultaneous use by millions of mobile and frequently disconnected
users is left as an excercise for the reader".
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Distributed Operating Systems.
JetFile Abstract
JetFile is a distributed file system designed to support shared file
access in a heterogenous environment such as the Internet. It uses
multicast communication and optimistic strategies for synchronization
and distribution.
JetFile relies on "peer-to-peer" communication over multicast
channels. Most of the traditional file server responsibilities have
been decentralized. In particular, the more heavyweight operations
such as serving file data and attributes are, in our system, the
responsibility of the clients. Some functions such as serializing file
updates are still centralized in JetFile. Since serialization is a
relatively lightweight operation in our system, serialization is
expected to have only minor impact on scalability.
We have implemented parts of the JetFile design and have measured its
performance over a local-area network and an emulated wide-area
network. Our measurements indicate that, using a standard benchmark,
JetFile performance is comparable to that of local-disk based file
systems. This means it is considerably faster than commonly used
distributed file systems such as NFS and AFS.
Available material:
- An article presented at SIGOPS 96,
in postscript.
- Slides from the Swedish High Performance Computing Network
Workshop, also in postscript.
- Results of mesaruments presented at the poster session at
SOSP16. An
abstract of that poster session, entitled JetFile: Implementation and
Measurements is available in postscript and HTML.
- A paper titled The Design of a Multicast-based
Distributed File System, presented at OSDI'99, is
available in postscript and HTML. The OSDI'99 slides are available in
postscript.
Recommended reading:
-
Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Liu, C., McCanne, S., and Zhang, L.,
A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and
Application Level Framing,
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, December
1997, Volume 5, Number 6, pp. 784-803.
-
Semeria C., Maufer T.,
Introduction to Multicast Routing.
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