Jun 22, 2022Insights from “the google file system” paperThis post was originally published at https://www.afterhoursacademic.com/gfs.html. ‘The google file system’ by Ghemawat et al. was published in ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) in 2003. The paper describes the file system developed by google (in case the paper title didn’t give that away) to support their increasing storage…2 min read2 min read
Nov 8, 2021Scale and performance in a distributed file system‘Scale and performance in a distributed file system’ by Howard et al. was published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems in 1988. The paper describes the Andrew File System (AFS). AFS is a distributed file system which was developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to support its users but went…Distributed File Systems7 min readDistributed File Systems7 min read
Oct 18, 2021Sun’s network file system‘Sun’s network file system’ is a chapter in the OSTEP book by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau that describes the Network File System (NFS) protocol developed by Sun in 1986. More specifically, it describes the NFSv2 protocol. …Network File System9 min readNetwork File System9 min read
Apr 12, 2021File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance“File System Design for an NFS Server Appliance” by Hitz, et al., was published in the USENIX Winter Technical Conference in 1994. The paper described the Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) file system used by NetApp. NetApp is one of the largest storage providers today and its storage appliances and…Copy On Write10 min readCopy On Write10 min read
Apr 5, 2021A Case for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)‘A Case for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)’ by Patterson, Gibson, and Katz was published in SIGMOD 1988. The paper was the result of David Patterson asking Garth Gibson to learn about high performance storage systems and teach the UC Berkeley architects. The paper coined the term RAID and…Raid12 min readRaid12 min read
Mar 23, 2021Metadata Update Performance in File Systems‘Metadata Update Performance in File Systems’ by Ganger and Patt was published in the first Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) in 1994. The paper proposed one of the many solutions to the problem of crash-consistency of file system metadata. We will begin this summary by describing the…Filesystem12 min readFilesystem12 min read
Mar 15, 2021The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System‘The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System’ by Rosenblum and Ousterhout was published in ACM Transaction on Computer Systems in 1992. The paper introduced the log-based storage which doubles down on the concept of leveraging faster sequential accesses on disks. Even though the log structured file system (LFS)…Filesystem7 min readFilesystem7 min read
Mar 8, 2021An interesting effect of the platter’s shape is that accessing data along the outer tracks is faster than accessing data from inner tracks. To understand the reasoning behind this, first consider that the data density (i.e., data per unit …An introduction to disk drive modeling41Rajat Kateja, After Hours AcademicThis seemingly low-level detail is used for real impact in systems.This seemingly low-level detail is used for real impact in systems. For example, Netflix takes into account this discrepancy in the access throughput across inner and outer tracks in their content distribution appliances. Source: 'Netflix: Streaming Entertainment to 200 Million Members Around the World' keynote from FAST 2021 https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast21/presentation/keynote-looney1 min read1 min read
Mar 8, 2021A Fast File System for UNIX‘A Fast File System for UNIX’ by McKusick et al. was published in the journal Transaction on Computer Systems in 1984. It’s take-away message of designing file systems to be aware of the underlying storage medium (HDDs in the case of the fast file system) laid the foundations for file…Fast File System6 min readFast File System6 min read
Mar 1, 2021Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance‘Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance’ by Agrawal, et al. was published in USENIX ATC 2008. This was right around the time when solid state disks (SSDs) were starting to become popular as a viable alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs). …Solid State Drive6 min readSolid State Drive6 min read
