NCFS is a proof-of-concept prototype of a Network-Coding-based Distributed File System. NCFS is a proxy-based file system that interconnects multiple storage nodes. It relays regular read/write operations between user applications and storage nodes, and relays data among storage nodes during the data repair process. NCFS is built on FUSE, an open-source, programmable user-space file system that provides application programmable interfaces (APIs) for file system operations. From the point of view of user applications, NCFS presents a file system layer that transparently stripes data across physical storage nodes.
NCFS supports a specific regenerating coding scheme called Exact Minimum Bandwidth Regenerating (E-MBR) codes [Rashmi et al.; 2009], which seek to minimize repair bandwidth. One key property of E-MBR is that it does not require any encoding/decoding intelligence on the storage nodes, as long as the storage nodes provide the standard I/O interfaces. NCFS also supports RAID-based erasure coding schemes, so as to enable us to conduct a comprehensive empirical study of different classes of data recovery for distributed storage under real network settings. To the best of our knowledge, NCFS is the first work that realizes regenerating codes in a practical distributed storage system.
NCFS is developed by Advanced Network and System Research Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). This project is also affiliated with the Institute of Network Coding at CUHK
Faculty:Please contact Patrick P. C. Lee if you have any questions.