Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Filesystems: Addressing The Last-Mile “Problem” In Services-Oriented/Cloud Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software framework that provides a uniform, configurable connector layer for mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between these two types of resources. Such mappings enable programmatic access to a resource, as well as composition of two or more resources, through the local operating system’s standard filesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports automatic and manual authentication.

As part of this talk, we demonstrate a new filesystem that interfaces to the SketchFab.com service to support 3D model visualization. For …

An Object-Oriented Framework For Userland Filesystem Development, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

Userland filesystems (also known as virtual/installable filesystems) represent a promising direction for interfacing the traditional filesystem concept to specific domain instances (e.g. finance, bioinformatics, astronomy, photo sharing services, etc.) One might initially be inclined to think of filesystems as “old school” or “so 1980s” but their use remains an established practice in computational science and in many business domains, owing to the stability of filesystems interfaces and the continued perception of having great overall performance. While the promise of building one’s own userland filesystems is great, the approach has seen little adoption, owing to the complexity of working with low-level …