Summary: Low­overhead Protocols for Fault­tolerant File Sharing
Lorenzo Alvisi Sriram Rao Harrick M. Vin
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712­1188, USA
Abstract
In this paper, we quantify the adverse effect of file­
sharing on the performance of reliable distributed appli­
cations. We demonstrate that file­sharing incurs significant
overhead, which is likely to triple over the next five years.
We present a novel approach that eliminates this overhead.
Our approach (1) tracks causal dependencies resulting
from file­sharing using determinants, (2) efficiently repli­
cates the determinants in the volatile memory of agents
to ensure their availability during recovery, and (3) repro­
duces during recovery the interactions with the file server
as well as the file data lost in a failure. Our approach
allows agents to exchange files directly, without first sav­
ing the files on disks at the server. As a consequence,
the costs of supporting file­sharing and message passing

Source: Alvisi, Lorenzo - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences