Replication in the Harp File System

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of the Harp (Highly Available Reliable Persistent) file system. Harp is a replicated Unix file system accessible via the VFS (Virtual File System) interface. It provides highly available and reliable storage for files and guarantees that file operations are executed atomically in spite of concurrency and failures. It uses a novel variation of the primary copy replication technique that provides good performance because it allows us to trade disk accesses for network communication. Harp is intended to be used within a file service in a distributed network; in our current implementation, it is accessed via NFS. Preliminary performance results indicate that Harp provides equal or better response time and system capacity than an unreplicated implementation of NFS that uses Unix files directly.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 1981
Accession Number
ADA240033

Entities

People

  • Barbara Liskov
  • Liuba Shrira
  • Paul Johnson
  • Robert Gruber
  • Sanjay Ghemawat

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Availability
  • Classification
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Environment
  • Local Area Networks
  • Massachusetts
  • Military Research
  • Operating Systems
  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Servers (Computer Hardware)
  • Software Development
  • Standards
  • Storage
  • Uninterruptible Power Supplies

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.