[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
2001-2002 Seminar Series
|
Mammoth: A Robust and Confederated Global File System
|
Mike Feeley
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science<>
University of British Columbia
|
DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
|
DATE:
|
Monday, March 18, 2002
|
|
TIME:
|
3:30pm
|
|
PLACE:
|
Anthropology 132
|
|
|
*** Everyone is welcome ***
|
|
Abstract
Modern file systems don't work. Not really. File data is accessible from
only a small set of computers (perhaps one) that have been carefully
configured by a human administrator; this data can be accidentally deleted
or overwritten by careless users and malicious programs; and it may be
lost when disks, systems, networks or physical facilities fail. While
most of us accept these core weaknesses without much thought, they are
poorly suited for the modern world in which people generate and manipulate
an increasingly wide variety of digital content such as home movies,
photographs, financial data, business data, journals, cookbooks, web pages
and on and on. It would be perfectly reasonable for users to expect their
valuable content to be stored safely and to be accessible any time from
any where. This, however, is almost never the case.
In this talk I will describe a file system we are building at UBC, called
Mammoth, that is designed to really work. Our goal is to provide scalable,
globally-accessible storage that automatically protects data from
accidental or malicious manipulation and from all forms of software,
hardware and physical failure. Scalability and accessibility are achieved
by storing data on a loosely-connected, peer-to-peer, confederation of PC
nodes. This structure allows the entire system to be comprised of perhaps
many thousands of nodes, but with each node aware of only a few of its
neighbors. Data is protected by retaining older versions of files and
directories and by automatically replicating some versions to other nodes.
User actions can thus be easily undone by restoring an older version and
failures can be easily recovered from by accessing versions stored on
nodes that have not failed. Updates to replicated data are handled in an
optimistic manner to allow nodes to read and write whatever version of
data they currently have access to, even if failures prevent the system
from guaranteeing that these are the current versions. Inconsistencies
that arise due to network partitions are automatically detected and
corrected when communication is re-established. In the talk, I will
describe our design and provide some details of our prototype
implementation, which is still being developed.
About the speaker
Mike Feeley has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the
University of British Columbia since 1997. His research interests span a
wide range of topics related to operating systems and distributed systems,
including file systems, the web and PC clusters. Mike received his Ph.D.
from the University of Washington in 1996.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]