Chirp: A practical global filesystem for cluster and grid computing

Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, Jeffrey Hemmes

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

38 Scopus citations

Abstract

Traditional distributed filesystem technologies designed for local and campus area networks do not adapt well to wide area Grid computing environments. To address this problem, we have designed the Chirp distributed filesystem, which is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of Grid computing. Chirp is easily deployed without special privileges, provides strong and flexible security mechanisms, tunable consistency semantics, and clustering to increase capacity and throughput. We demonstrate that many of these features also provide order-of-magnitude performance increases over wide area networks. We describe three applications in bioinformatics, biometrics, and gamma ray physics that each employ Chirp to attack large scale data intensive problems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)51-72
Number of pages22
JournalJournal of Grid Computing
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • Cluster computing
  • Filesystem
  • Grid computing

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