8. RELATED WORK Like other large distributed file systems such as AFS [5], GFS provides a location independent namespace which enables data to be moved transparently for load balance or fault tolerance. Unlike AFS, GFS spreads a file’s data across storage servers in a way more akin to xFS [1] and Swift [3] in order to deliver aggregate performance and increased fault tolerance. As disks are relatively cheap and replication is simpler than more sophisticated RAID [9] approaches, GFS currently uses only replication for redundancy and so consumes more raw storage than xFS or Swift. In contrast to systems like AFS, xFS, Frangipani [12], and Intermezzo [6], GFS does not provide any caching below the file system interface. Our target workloads have little reuse within a single application run because they either stream through a large data set or randomly seekwith in it and read small amounts of data each time. Some distributed file systems like Frangipani, xFS, Minnesota’s GFS[11] and GPF...

4.5 Stale Replica Detection  Chunkrep licas may become stale if a chunkserver fails and misses mutations to the chunkwh ile it is down. For each chunk, the master maintains a chunk version number to distinguish between up-to-date and stale replicas. Whenever the master grants a new lease on a chunk, it increases the chunkv ersion number and informs the up-todate replicas. The master and these replicas all record the new version number in their persistent state. This occurs before any client is notified and therefore before it can start writing to the chunk. If another replica is currently unavailable, its chunkv ersion number will not be advanced. The master will detect that this chunkserver has a stale replica when the chunkserver restarts and reports its set of chunks and their associated version numbers. If the master sees a version number greater than the one in its records, the master assumes that it failed when granting the lease and so takes the higher version to be up-to-...

2.6.2 Chunk Locations  The master does not keep a persistent record of which chunkservers have a replica of a given chunk. It simply polls chunkservers for that information at startup. The master can keep itself up-to-date thereafter because it controls all chunkpl acement and monitors chunkserver status with regular HeartBeat messages. We initially attempted to keep chunk location information persistently at the master, but we decided that it was much simpler to request the data from chunkservers at startup, and periodically thereafter. This eliminated the problem of keeping the master and chunkservers in sync as chunkservers join and leave the cluster, change names, fail, restart, and so on. In a cluster with hundreds of servers, these events happen all too often. Another way to understand this design decision is to realize that a chunkserver has the final word over what chunks it does or does not have on its own disks. There is no point in trying to maintain a consistent view ...

[ Notice -this  article is only for knowledge purpose and education purpose. i m not author of this article. just sharing with you. ] ABSTRACT  We have designed and implemented the Google File System, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers high aggregate performance to a large number of clients. While sharing many of the same goals as previous distributed file systems, our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and technological environment, both current and anticipated, that reflect a marked departure from some earlier file system assumptions. This has led us to reexamine traditional choices and explore radically different design points. The file system has successfully met our storage needs. It is widely deployed within Google as the storage platform for the generation and processing of data use...