[Vrs-development] Distributed Filesystem

[Ian Fung]

first question is whether the vrs is going to house a distributed file
*system*? or a distributed file *repository*? in my mind, a distributed
file repository doesnt have the same properties as a dfs. a file system
needs to be consistent and sychronized. if we indeed do want the vrs to
be a file system which i believe we do and should, then we're going to
have to define what that really means. obviously, it is impossible to
create a file system by the traditional definition in a distributed
environment. what we can do is try to maintain consistency and
sychronization as best we can. the trickest part is to decide what
happens when enough LDS leaves the vrs such that data is lost even if we
use redundancy. the mechanism by which modifications are propagated to
all LDS's is not really the main issue. we should probably think about
how we negotiate conflicts, deal with lost information, and stuff like
that.

although this is another issue entirely, it may help with dealing with
lost data. in the vrs, maybe we can intelligently store data on LDS
nodes that actually use them (when possible). the idea is to monitor
usage of files in a given time slot (epoch), then at the end of the
epoch push files to (or near) LDS's that have been using em. just an
idea.