Bridge

Developed by:
University of Rochester, USA Peter C. Dibble and Michael L. Scott

Short Description:
Bridge is a parallel multiprocessor file system that has been designed to eliminate the limitations, which are influenced by the performance of the processor running the file system. This is achieved by spreading both data and file system computation over a large number of processors and disks. To access the effectiveness of Bridge it was used to implement several data-intensive applications, including a parallel external merge sort. Bridge is an implementation of a parallel interleaved file system on the BNN Butterfly Parallel Processor. Bridge has two main functional layers. The lower layer consists of a Local File System (LFS) on each of the processors with disks. The upper layer is called the Bridge Server; it maintains the integrity of the file syste m as a whole and provides the initial interface to user applications. Except for a few functions that act on the state of the server itself, the Bridge Server interprets I/O requests and dispatches to the appropriate LFSs.

Model: multiprocessor
Properties: interleaved files
Transparency: access, location
Running on: BBN Butterfly Parallel Processor
Date: 1990

References:
Peter C. Dibble; Michael L. Scott and Carla Schlatter Ellis: "Bridge: A High-Performance File System for Parallel Processors". San Jose, CA 1988 IEEE Computer Society, 8th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, June 1988, pp.154-161

FTP: cayuga.cs.rochester.edu