DATE: Thursday, October 11, 2001
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220

SPEAKER:
Bill Bolosky
Microsoft

TITLE:
Farsite: A Serverless Distributed File System in an Untrusted Environment

ABSTRACT:
I will describe the design, implementation and performance of a secure serverless distributed file system that runs on ordinary untrusted desktop workstations. It provides semantics similar to those of a server-based distributed file system, security of file and directory information against compromises of any particular machine in the system, and reliability of file data that is comparable to that provided by RAID-based central file servers. The system uses cryptographic techniques to ensure the secrecy of file data and names, and Byzantine-fault tolerance to ensure the integrity of file data and of updates to directory information. The system is designed in such a way that it could scale to all the machines of a large enterprise.

BIO:
Bill Bolosky is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. His interests lie in storage systems and distributed computation, and more generally in operating systems. He leads the Farsite distributed file system project. His earlier work at Microsoft included the Tiger video file server and the Windows 2000 Single Instance Store. He worked on NUMA memory systems while completing a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, and on the Mach operating system while at CMU in the 80s. While not working or spending time with his wife and one year old son, he is an avid hang glider pilot.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/