Project Title:

The LAFS Kernel File System

06.01-2490
NAS1-19034
The LAFS Kernel File System
Galloway Research
	795 Beaver Creek Way
	San Jose, CA 95133
		John R. Galloway, Jr.
(408-259-2490)

Abstract:

	Over the past 15 years improvements in the price and capacity of disk drives have
roughly matched the dramatic gains made in processor speeds. However, raw input-output
and seek rates of disks have improved far less, and the basic architecture of kernel
file systems has remained essentially unchanged. The result is that today's high
performance systems are often severely limited by file-system throughput. This project
investigates a new kernel file-system architecture called LAFS which, through the
use of a new addressing paradigm, offers higher performance and reliability and greater
ease of use than current designs. Improvements are available for both multi-threaded
diverse loads (e.g. file servers, timesharing, DBMS) and for single stream applications
(e.g. computation intensive analysis, graphics). Phase I will result in a functional
emulation of this system operating on a single drive hosted in a conventional workstation.
Performance under various loads will be compared to the standard system. These results
and the host system software and interfaces would be directly used in Phase II/III
for a full scale prototype.

Potential Commercial Application:

Potential Commercial Applications: The key innovation is architectural and may be
expressed in a wide variety  of implementations for incorporation into existing product
lines. The firm intends to license LAFS technology to computer system vendors. .