Space allocation is a critical facility for making reliable data intensive computing systems. However, traditional operating systems do not make it easy to guarantee that space will be available for a future operation.
To address this limitation, we have developed AllocFS , a filesystem that allows users to make guaranteed space allocations within an existing directory structure. For example, the user simply issues mkalloc /dir/name 25M and receives a directory that is guaranteed to hold 25MB of data. Allocations are hierarchical, so this space can be further divided for other purposes.
AllocFS is a modified version of the production ext2 filesystem. It is a loadable kernel module that uses the same on-disk layout as ext2, so the allocation facility can be added to (or removed from) an existing filesystem without reformatting.
@inproceedings{alloc-grid06,author={Thain, Douglas},title={{Operating System Support for Space Allocation in Grid Storage Systems}},booktitle={{IEEE Grid Computing}},pages={104-111},year={2006},note={{doi: 10.1109/ICGRID.2006.311004}},cclpaperid={41},keywords={chirp, allocfs, filesystems, career, gridfs},}
Separating Abstractions from Resources in a Tactical Storage System
Douglas Thain, Sander Klous, Justin Wozniak, Paul Brenner, Aaron Striegel, and Jesus Izaguirre
@inproceedings{tactical-sc05,author={Thain, Douglas and Klous, Sander and Wozniak, Justin and Brenner, Paul and Striegel, Aaron and Izaguirre, Jesus},title={{Separating Abstractions from Resources in a Tactical Storage System}},booktitle={{IEEE/ACM Supercomputing}},pages={55-67},year={2005},note={{doi: 10.1109/SC.2005.64}},cclpaperid={52},keywords={parrot, chirp, allocfs, filesystems, career, hecura, gridfs},}
