[Crib-list] Friday, March 2, 2007 -- Computational Research in Boston Seminar

[Shirley Entzminger]

 		COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON SEMINAR


DATE:		FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2007
TIME:		12:30 PM
LOCATION:	Building 32, Room 141 (Stata Center)

[Pizza and beverages will be provided at 12:15 PM.]


Title:	BUILDING DISTRIBUTED, WIDE-AREA APPLICATIONS WITH WHEELFS


Speaker:	JEREMY STRIBLING (M.I.T.)


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.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA  02139



http://www-math.mit.edu/crib
For information on CRiB, contact:

Alan Edelman:  edelman at math.mit.edu
Steven G. Johnson:  stevenj at math.mit.edu
Jeremy Kepner:  kepner at ll.mit.edu