Systems Colloquium
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
4:00 p.m., AKW 500

Host: Bryan Ford

Speaker: Jacob Strauss, MIT

Title: Device-Transparent Personal Storage

Abstract: Users increasingly store data collections such as digital photographs on multiple personal devices, each of which typically presents the user with an isolated storage management interface. The result is that collections easily become disorganized and drift out of sync.

This talk presents Eyo, a novel storage system that provides device transparency: a user can think in terms of "file X," rather than "file X on device Y," and will see the same set of files on all personal devices. Eyo allows a user to view and manage his entire collection of objects from any of his devices, even from disconnected devices and devices with too little storage to hold all the object content. Eyo separates metadata (application-specific attributes of objects) from the content of objects, allowing even storage-limited devices to store all metadata and thus provide device transparency. Fully replicated metadata also helps Eyo support arbitrary synchronization topologies. A second unusual aspect of Eyo's design is that it presents applications with all "head" versions of objects that have been updated concurrently on multiple devices, allowing the application to incorporate these versions naturally into its existing user interface.

This is joint work with Chris Lesniewski-Laas, Justin Mazzola Paluska, Bryan Ford, Robert Morris, and Frans Kaashoek.

Bio: Jacob Strauss is a PhD student at MIT CSAIL. His research interests lie in distributed systems, including networks, operating systems, and storage.