DHPC Talk DHPCT-019

DWorFS: File System Support for Legacy Applications in DISCWorld

Craig Patten

Archived: 25 February 1999

Presented at the 5th IDEA Workshop, Fremantle, February 1998.
See also the accompanying technical paper.

Abstract

Applications can be embedded in a distributed computing environment such as DISCWorld in two ways. One approach is to (re)write applications to conform with data access interfaces such as libraries which can communicate with distributed and/or hierarchical storage. Alternatively, unmodified applications can be provided with normal file system services, often the only approach with legacy or commercial applications where source code is not freely available. We describe some ideas for supporting such applications, through a system we are designing and implementing called the DISCWorld File System (DWorFS), which uses the ubiquitous Network File System (NFS) protocol. User requests are formulated in two stages: negotiation for virtual directories and files of input data, or locations for output data; and an invocation of the application, to which the virtual input and output file(s) are specified.


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