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The ADvanced Systems Laboratory (ADSL)
Publication abstract

Physical Disentanglement in a Container-Based File System

Lanyue Lu, Yupu Zhang, Thanh Do, Samer Al-Kiswany, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau

Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract:

We introduce IceFS, a novel file system that separates physical structures of the file system. A new abstraction, the cube, is provided to enable the grouping of files and directories inside a physically isolated container. We show three major benefits of cubes within IceFS: localized reaction to faults, fast recovery, and concurrent filesystem updates. We demonstrate these benefits within a VMware-based virtualized environment and within the Hadoop distributed file system. Results show that our prototype can significantly improve availability and performance, sometimes by an order of magnitude.

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