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Chirp: a practical global filesystem for cluster and Grid computing

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Abstract

Traditional distributed filesystem technologies designed for local and campus area networks do not adapt well to wide area Grid computing environments. To address this problem, we have designed the Chirp distributed filesystem, which is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of Grid computing. Chirp is easily deployed without special privileges, provides strong and flexible security mechanisms, tunable consistency semantics, and clustering to increase capacity and throughput. We demonstrate that many of these features also provide order-of-magnitude performance increases over wide area networks. We describe three applications in bioinformatics, biometrics, and gamma ray physics that each employ Chirp to attack large scale data intensive problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti & Jeffrey Hemmes

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  1. Douglas Thain
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  2. Christopher Moretti
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  3. Jeffrey Hemmes
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Correspondence to Douglas Thain.

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Thain, D., Moretti, C. & Hemmes, J. Chirp: a practical global filesystem for cluster and Grid computing. J Grid Computing 7, 51–72 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-008-9100-5

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