FINAL: Flexible and Scalable Composition of File System Name Spaces

Michael J. Brim, Barton P. Miller, and Victor Zandy

Group file operations enable tools and middleware to operate upon a large
group of files located across thousands of independent servers in a
scalable fashion, a necessary requirement for effective use of today's
largest distributed systems.  Our initial prototype of group file
operations showed scalability benefits for several tools, but also revealed
the importance of having a scalable method for defining useful groups.  We
have developed a language called FINAL for describing name space
composition in a flexible and scalable manner.  Clients of our TBON-FS
distributed file system can use this language to compose a single-system
image (SSI) name space that automatically creates useful groups in a
scalable fashion.  We provide many examples of traditional and SSI name
space compositions that can be described using FINAL, and report how
TBON-FS can compose a global name space from tens of thousands of
independent name spaces in one-quarter second.