MAPFS: MultiAgent Parallel File System

A Parallel File System For Clusters

Since from many decades the I/O system has been one of the major bottlenecks in general purpose distributed systems, because of the difference between the computing and I/O time. Parallel I/O is one of the proposed solutions to this problem. In this area, a large number of parallel I/O libraries and parallel file systems have been developed.

These systems have some drawbacks. Many of these ones do not include dynamic reconfiguration features and provide a limited functionality.

Furthermore, most of the I/O systems that use I/O optimizations, do not provide flexibility to the applications, trying to hide these features to such applications. However, with the aim of increasing I/O operations performance, it is important to allow applications to describe their access patterns and to interact with the underlying I/O system.

On a different domain, the agents paradigm offers several characteristics to applications, very appropriate for their adaptation to complex and dynamic environments. These features can be used for solving some of the problems on the parallel I/O field.

MAPFS proposes a solution of the I/O problem by means of three different lines: the usage of agents theory in high-performance I/O systems, the definition of a formalism that allows storage servers of a cluster to be dynamically reconfigured and the usage of configurable and application-oriented I/O optimization approaches.

Obtaining MAPFS (Beta version)

You can download the beta version from mapfs.2004.tar.gz link.

Want to learn more about MAPFS?

If you are interested in more details about the MAPFS file system you can contact María S. Pérez.

public/mapfs.txt · Last modified: 2010/11/18 13:12 by mperez
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