Over the past 15 years improvements in the price and capacity of disk drives have roughly matched the dramatic gains made in processor speeds. However, raw input-output and seek rates of disks have improved far less, and the basic architecture of kernel file systems has remained essentially unchanged. The result is that today's high performance systems are often severely limited by file-system throughput. This project investigates a new kernel file-system architecture called LAFS which, through the use of a new addressing paradigm, offers higher performance and reliability and greater ease of use than current designs. Improvements are available for both multi-threaded diverse loads (e.g. file servers, timesharing, DBMS) and for single stream applications (e.g. computation intensive analysis, graphics). Phase I will result in a functional emulation of this system operating on a single drive hosted in a conventional workstation. Performance under various loads will be compared to the standard system. These results and the host system software and interfaces would be directly used in Phase II/III for a full scale prototype.
Potential Commercial Applications: The key innovation is architectural and may be expressed in a wide variety of implementations for incorporation into existing product lines. The firm intends to license LAFS technology to computer system vendors.STATUS: Phase I Only
