WheelFS - a wide-area file system for distributed applications
WheelFS is a FUSE-based distributed file system that offers flexible wide-area storage for distributed applications. Different applications have different needs from their storage system, and WheelFS gives applications the control they need via semantic cues. Applications can embed these cues directly into the pathname of its files to direct the behavior of WheelFS. WheelFS is free and open-source software, released under the MIT license.
The main features of WheelFS are:
- POSIX file system API support: unmodified applications can use WheelFS as a shared storage system
- Consistency control: applications can use strong consistency by default, or choose eventual consistency to improve performance
- Replication control: applications can choose how many copies of each file are made, and can control where those copies are placed
- Swarming reads: if many nodes are reading the same data, the application can ask WheelFS to use a BitTorrent-like algorithm to improve read performance
- Timeout control: applications can control how long WheelFS blocks their file system calls
- Security: WheelFS supports UNIX-like access controls on data, and uses secure connections to ensure your data's security on the network
WheelFS is currently in pre-alpha release, and we only actively support its use on PlanetLab.
You might find WheelFS useful if:
- You want to run an application on many (between two and a few hundred) machines separated by wide-area networks
- The different instances of your application create data that need to be shared with other instances, or you want to distribute data to all instances of your application (for example, configuration files or application binaries)
- The data can be stored in files within a directory hierarchy (WheelFS is not a distributed database)
- You're willing to risk using a research system in pre-alpha, meaning that no particular level of performance or correctness is guaranteed
For announcements, info, help, or suggestions, please use (and join!) our mailing list: wheelfs-users
To learn more about WheelFS or to try it out, see the following:
