DATE: Thursday , May 22, 2003
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Hamerschlag Hall D-210

SPEAKER:
Niraj Tolia
Carnegie Mellon University

TITLE:
Opportunistic Use of Content Addressable Storage for Distributed File Systems

ABSTRACT:
Motivated by the prospect of using readily available Content Addressable Storage (CAS) to accelerate distributed file system access, we introduce the CASPER file system.

Central to CASPER is the concept of file recipes. A file's recipe is a first-class file system object listing content hashes that describe the data blocks composing the file. File recipes provide applications with instructions for reconstructing the original file from available CAS data blocks. One such application of recipes is the CASPER distributed file system.

In CASPER, a client opportunistically fetches blocks from nearby CAS providers to improve its performance when the connection to a file server traverses a low-bandwidth path. The results from our prototype demonstrate significant reduction in execution time for applications that use a network file system.

This work is the result of collaboration with Intel Research Pittsburgh.

BIO:
Niraj Tolia is a first-year Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University working with Prof. M. Satyanarayanan. His current research interests lie in distributed systems, and in distributed storage systems in particular.

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