NeST: Network Storage Flexible Commodity Storage Appliances

NeST is software network storage appliance designed to provide guaranteed storage allocation. These allocation units, called lots, provide a guaranteed space for a period of time. Both the size and duration of lots are negotiated between NeST and the user or application. NeST lots can also be expanded in size and extended in time (again, this is negotiated between the user / application and NeST), and can be subdivided into a hierarchy. Expired lots are reclaimed by NeST, allowing the space to be re-used. NeST also provides access control lists for both lot and file access. Finally, NeST provides multiple protocol interfaces, including its internal 'Chirp', HTTP and GSI-FTP, the latter accomplished through close collaboration with the GridFTP team.

NeST was originally designed and developed primarily by John Bent, at the time a graduate student. Currently, NeST is maintained & developed primarily by Nick LeRoy, a staff member of the Condor Team.

For more information, a good place to start is the HPDC paper.  Please feel free also to email us with any questions, suggestions or concerns.

News

2006-11-13 NeST 0.9.8 released.

Papers
• Flexibility, Manageability, and Performance in a Grid Storage Appliance
  John Bent, Venkateshwaran Venkataramani, Nick LeRoy, Alain Roy, Joseph Stanley, Andrea C. Arpaci Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Miron Livny
  Proceedings of the Eleventh IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
  Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2002.
  Available as: Abstract   Postscript   PDF
  


• Exploiting Gray-Box Knowledge of Buffer-Cache Management
  Nathan C. Burnett, John Bent, Andrea C. Arpaci Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
  The 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
  Monterey, CA, USA, June 2002
  Available as: Abstract   Postscript   PDF
  
  
• Technical report
John Bent, Venkateshwaran V,
Available as: Postscript  PDF.


• Gathering at the Well: Creating Communities for Grid I/O
Douglas Thain, John Bent, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, and Miron Livny,
Proceedings of Supercomputing 2001
Denver, Colorado, November 2001
Available as: Postscript  PDF.
Talks
• Grid Communities, November 2002
Available as: Powerpoint
• Status report, March 2002
Available as: Powerpoint html
• Poster, September 2001
Available as: Powerpoint html
• Overview,  February 2001
Available as Powerpoint html
• Identifying Client Requirements, August 2000
Available as Powerpoint html
• Original poster, June 2000
Available as Powerpoint html.
Downloads
• NeST v0.9.5 , Released on 25-Sept-2003. This version corrects several file and directory permission problems. To build NeST 0.9.5, you'll need ClassAds 0.9.5.
• NeST v0.9.6 , Released on 05-March-2004. This version fixes a number of bugs and cleans up the logic to synchronize the user list to the grid mapfile.
• NeST v0.9.7 Pre 1 , Released on 11-March-2005. This NeST pre-release release is the first of release which contains a great deal of reworking of the NeST code, the ultimate goal of which is greater usability & stability.
• NeST v0.9.8 , Released on 13-November-2006 This NeST release contains the latest stable NeST release. Since 0.9.7, a lot of rework has been done, including the stripping out of a lot of research code. GridFTP support is no longer in NeST itself; rather a GridFTP DSI module is built, so the GridFTP server itself becomes a front-end to NeST. A great deal of work has been done to improve stability.
• CVS repository
Documentation
• NeST 0.9 manual
Licensing
• This program is released under the Condor Public License.
Mailing Lists
• Two mailing lists serve the various NeST related projects. nest-announce (archive) is a low-traffic list used solely for announcements of software releases and bug fixes. nest-discuss (archive) is for general questions and discussion about using and applying this software.

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