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In computing, a file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way a paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a "". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system." There are many kinds of file systems, each with unique structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size and more. Some file systems have been designed to be used for specific applications. For example, the ISO 9660 and UDF file systems are des

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Managing Tail Latency in Datacenter-Scale File Systems Under Production Constraints

Ricardo Bianchini, Maria Fernanda Borge Chavez, Willy Zwaenepoel

Distributed file systems often exhibit high tail latencies, especially in large-scale datacenters and in the presence of competing (and possibly higher priority) workloads. This paper introduces techniques for managing tail latencies in these systems, while addressing the practical challenges inherent in production datacenters (e.g., hardware heterogeneity, interference from other workloads, the need to maximize simplicity and maintainability). We implement our techniques in a scalable distributed file system (an extension of HDFS) used in production at Microsoft. Our evaluation uses 70k servers in 3 datacenters, and shows that our techniques reduce tail latency significantly for production workloads.

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

Hailstorm: Disaggregated Compute and Storage for Distributed LSM-based Databases

Laurent Bindschaedler, Ashvin Goel, Willy Zwaenepoel

Distributed LSM-based databases face throughput and latency issues due to load imbalance across instances and interference from background tasks such as flushing, compaction, and data migration. Hailstorm addresses these problems by deploying the database storage engines over a distributed filesystem that disaggregates storage from processing, enabling storage pooling and compaction offloading. Hailstorm pools storage devices within a rack, allowing each storage engine to fully utilize the aggregate rack storage capacity and bandwidth. Storage pooling successfully handles load imbalance without the need for resharding. Hailstorm offloads compaction tasks to remote nodes, distributing their impact, and improving overall system throughput and response time. We show that Hailstorm achieves load balance in many MongoDB deployments with skewed workloads, improving the average throughput by 60%, while decreasing tail latency by as much as 5X. In workloads with range queries, Hailstorm provides up to 22X throughput improvements. Hailstorm also enables cost savings of 47-56% in OLTP workloads.

ACM2020

IO-Lite: a unified I/O buffering and caching system

Willy Zwaenepoel

This article presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of IO -Lite, a unified I/O buffering and caching system for general-purpose operating systems. IO-Lite unifies all buffering and caching in the system, to the extent permitted by the hardware. In particular, it allows applications, the interprocess communication system, the file system, the file cache, and the network subsystem to safely and concurrently share a single physical copy of the data. Protection and security are maintained through a combination of access control and read-only sharing. IO-Lite eliminates all copying and multiple buffering of I/O data, and enables various cross-subsystem optimizations. Experiments with a Web server show performance improvements between 40 and 80% on real workloads as a result of IO-Lite.

2000

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Introduction to basic concepts of operating systems.

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This course is intended for students who want to understand modern large-scale data analysis systems and database systems. It covers a wide range of topics and technologies, and will prepare students to be able to build such systems as well as read and understand recent research publications.

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An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks f

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In computing, a computer file is a resource for recording data on a computer storage device, primarily identified by its . Just as words can be written on paper, so can data be written to a computer

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File Allocation Table (FAT) is a developed for personal computers and was the default filesystem for MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks,