Ph.D. Alumni: Orran Krieger

Reference:

Orran Krieger
HFS: A flexible file system for shared-memory multiprocessors
Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 1994.

Supervisor(s):

Michael Stumm

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Abstract:

The HURRICANE File System (HFS) is designed for large-scale, shared-memory multiprocessors. Its architecture is based on the principle that a file system must support a wide variety of file structures, file system policies and I/O interfaces to maximize performance for a wide variety of applications. HFS uses a novel, object-oriented building-block approach to provide the flexibility needed to support this variety of file structures, policies, and I/O interfaces. File structures can be defined in HFS that optimize for sequential or random access, read-only, write-only or read/write access, sparse or dense data, large or small file sizes, and different degrees of application concurrency. Policies that can be defined on a per-file or per-open instance basis include locking policies, prefetching policies, compression/decompression policies and file cache management policies. In contrast, most existing file systems have been designed to support a single file structure and a small set of policies.

We have implemented large portions of HFS as part of the HURRICANE operating system running on the HECTOR shared-memory multiprocessor. We demonstrate that the flexibility of HFS comes with little processing or I/O overhead. Also, we show that HFS is able to deliver the full I/O bandwidth of the disks on our system to the applications.

Keywords:

Operating systems, file systems, parallel systems, shared memory multiprocessors

BibTeX:

@phdthesis(Krieger-PhD94,
    author = {Orran Krieger},
    title = {HFS: A flexible file system for shared-memory multiprocessors},
    school = {Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto},
    address = {Toronto, Canada},
    supervisors = {Michael Stumm},
    year = {1994},
    keywords = {Operating systems, file systems, parallel systems, shared memory multiprocessors}
)