Function
Scientists such as those running Folding@home have to deal with massive amounts of data, which must be stored and backed up, and this is very expensive. Traditionally, methods such as storing the data on RAID servers are used, but these become impractical for research budgets at this scale. The Pande Group already has to deal with reliably storing hundreds of terabytes of scientific data, and this continually growing. Adam Beberg and Vijay Pande took experience from Folding@home and began work on Storage@home. The project is designed based on the Cosm Distributed File System (Cosm FS), and the workload and analysis needed for Folding@home results. While Folding@home volunteers can easily participate in Storage@home, much more disk space is needed from the user than Folding@home, to create a robust network. Volunteers each donate 10 GB of storage space, which would hold encrypted files. These users gain points as a reward for reliable storage. Each file saved on the system is replicated four times, each spread across 10 geographically distant hosts. Redundancy also occurs over different operating systems and across time zones. If the servers detect the disappearance of an individual contributor, the data blocks held by that user would then be automatically duplicated to other hosts. Ideally, users would participate for a minimum of six months, and would alert the Storage@home servers before certain changes on their end such as a planned move of a machine or a bandwidth downgrade. Data stored on Storage@home is maintained through redundancy and monitoring, with repairs done as needed. Through careful application of redundancy, encryption, digital signatures, automated monitoring and correction, large quantities of data could be reliably and easily retrieved. This ensures a robust network that will lose the least possible data.
Storage Resource Broker is the closest storage project to Storage@home.
Read more about this topic: Storage@home
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how to be men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)