Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Kosha: A Peer-to-Peer Enhancement for the Network File System

  • Published:
Journal of Grid Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The storage needs of modern scientific applications are growing exponentially, and designing economical storage solutions for such applications – especially in Grid environments – is an important research topic. This work presents Kosha, a system that aims to harvest redundant storage space on cluster nodes and user desktops to provide a reliable, shared file system that acts as a large distributed storage. Kosha utilizes peer-to-peer (p2p) mechanisms to enhance the widely-used Network File System (NFS). P2P storage systems provide location transparency, mobility transparency, load balancing, and file replication – features that are not available in NFS. On the other hand, NFS provides hierarchical file organization, directory listings, and file permissions, which are missing from p2p storage systems. By blending the strengths of NFS and p2p storage systems, Kosha provides a low overhead storage solution. Our experiments show that compared to unmodified NFS, Kosha introduces a 3.3% fixed overhead and 4.5% additional overhead as nodes are increased from two to sixteen. For larger number of nodes, the additional overhead increases slowly. Kosha achieves load balancing in distributed directories, and guarantees \(99.99\%\) or better file availability.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. F. 180-1. Secure Hash Standard. Technical Report Publication 180-1, Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), NIST, US Department of Commerce, Washington District of Columbia, April (1995)

  2. Adya, A., Bolosky, W.J., Castro, M., Cermak, G., Chaiken, R., Douceur, J.R., Howell, J., Lorch, J.R., Theimer, M., Wattenhofer, R.P.: FARSITE: Federated, Available, and Reliable Storage for an Incompletely Trusted Environment. In: Proc. OSDI, December (2002)

  3. Anderson, T.E., Dahlin, M.D., Neefe, J.M., Patterson, D.A., Roselli, D.S., Wang, R.Y.: Serverless network file systems. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 14(1), (1996)

  4. Bolosky, W.J., Douceur, J.R., Ely, D., Theimer, M.: Feasibility of a serverless distributed system deployed on an existing set of desktop pcs. In: Proc. SIGMETRICS, June (2000)

  5. Brodsky, D., Pomkoski, J., Feely, M., Hutchinson, N., Brodsky, A.: Using versioning to simplify the implementation of a highly-available file system. Technical Report TR-2001-07, The University of British Columbia, Canada, (2001)

  6. Butt, A.R., Zhang, R., Hu, Y.C.: A self-organizing flock of Condors. In: Proc. ACM/IEEE SC2003: International Conference for High Performance Computing and Communications, Phoenix, AZ, November (2003)

  7. Callaghan, B.: NFS Illustrated. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., (2000)

  8. Castro, M., Druschel, P., Hu, Y.C., Rowstron, A.: Exploiting network proximity in peer-to-peer overlay networks. Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-82, Rice Univeristy, (2002)

  9. Castro, M., Ganesh, A., Rowstron, A., Wallach. D.S.: Security for structured peer-to-peer overlay networks. In: Proc. OSDI, December (2002)

  10. Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In: Proc. OSDI, February (1999)

  11. Clarke, I., Sandberg, O., Wiley, B., Hong, T.W.: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System. 〈http://freenetproject.org/freenet.pdf〉 (1999)

  12. Compaq. Compaq Product Information. 〈http://www.compaq.com/〉 (2004)

  13. Dabek, F., Kaashoek, M.F., Karger, D., Morris, R., Stoica, I.: Wide-area cooperative storage with CFS. In: Proc. SOSP, October (2001)

  14. Dell Computer Corporation. Dell – Client & Enterprise Solutions, Software, Peripherals, Services. 〈http://www.dell.com/〉 (2004)

  15. Druschel et al. Freepastry. 〈http://freepastry.rice.edu/〉 (2004)

  16. Foster, I., Kesselman, C. Globus: A metacomputing infrastructure toolkit. Int. J. Supercomput. Appl. High Performance Comput. 11(2), 115–128, Summer (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Foster, I., Kesselman, C. (eds.). The GRID: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Morgan Kaufmann, (1999)

  18. Frankel, J., Pepper, T.: The Gnutella protocol specification v0.4. 〈http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/d~onahoo/classes/4321/GNUTellaProtocolV0.4Rev1.2.pdf〉 (2003)

  19. Howard, J.H., Kazar, M.L., Menees, S.G., Nichols, D.A., Satyanarayanan, M., Sidebotham, R.N., West, M.J.: Scale and performance in a distributed file system. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 6(1), 51–81 (1988)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Kubiatowicz, J. et al.: Oceanstore: An architecture for global-scale persistent store. In: Proc. ASPLOS, November (2000)

  21. Litzkow, M.J.M.J., Livny, M., Mutka. M.W.: Condor – A hunter of idle workstations. In: Proc. ICDCS, June (1988)

  22. Mazieres, D.: A toolkit for user-level file systems. In: Proc. USENIX Technical Conference, June (2001)

  23. Muthitacharoen, A., Morris, R., Gil, T.M., Chen, B.: Ivy: A read/write peer-to-peer file system. In: Proc. OSDI, December (2002)

  24. Ratnasamy, S., Francis, P., Handley, M., Karp, R., Schenker, S.: A Scalable Content-Addressable Network. In: Proc. SIGCOMM, August (2001)

  25. Rhea, S., Eaton, P., Geels, D., Weatherspoon, H., Zhao, B., Kubiatowicz, J.: Pond: The oceanstore prototype. In: Proc. USENIX FAST, December (2003)

  26. Rowstron, A., Druschel, P.: Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In: Proc. IFIP/ACM Middleware, November (2001)

  27. Rowstron, A., Druschel, P.: Storage management and caching in PAST, a large-scale, persistent peer-to-peer storage utility. In: Proc. SOSP, October (2001)

  28. Saito, Y., Karamanolis, C., Karlsson, M., Mahalingam, M.: Taming aggressive replication in the Pangaea wide-area file system. In: Proc. OSDI, December (2002)

  29. Sandberg, R., Goldberg, D., Kleiman, S., Walsh, D., Lyon, B.: Design and implementation of the Sun network file system. In: Proc. Summer USENIX, June (1985)

  30. Sharman Networks. Kazaa Media Desktop. 〈http://www.kazaa.com/index.htm〉 (2004)

  31. Shepler, S., Callaghan, B., Robinson, D., Thurlow, R., Beame, C., Eisler, M., Noveck, D.: RFC3530: Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Protocol. 〈http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3530.txt〉 (2004)

  32. Stoica, I., Morris, R., Karger, D., Kaashoek, M.F., Balakrishnan, H.: Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications. In: Proc. SIGCOMM, August (2001)

  33. Thekkath, C.A., Mann, T., Lee. E.K.: Frangipani: A scalable distributed file system. In: Proc. SOSP, October (1997)

  34. Zhao, B.Y., Kubiatowicz, J.D., Joseph, A.D.: Tapestry: An Infrastructure for Fault-Resilient Wide-area Location and Routing. Technical Report UCB//CSD-01-1141, U. C. Berkeley, April (2001)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Ali R. Butt, Troy A. Johnson, Yili Zheng & Y. Charlie Hu

Authors
  1. Ali R. Butt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Troy A. Johnson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Yili Zheng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Y. Charlie Hu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Y. Charlie Hu.

Additional information

*This work was supported in part by an NSF CAREER award (ACI-0238379).

Troy A. Johnson was supported by a U.S. Department of Education GAANN doctoral fellowship.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Butt, A.R., Johnson, T.A., Zheng, Y. et al. Kosha: A Peer-to-Peer Enhancement for the Network File System. J Grid Computing 4, 323–341 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-006-9035-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-006-9035-7

Key words

Search

Navigation