ASDF: An Autonomous and Scalable Distributed File System

The demand for huge storage space on data-intensive applications and high-performance scientific computing continues to grow. To integrate massive distributed storage resources for providing huge storage space is an important and challenging issue in Cloud and Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a distributed file system, called ASDF, to meet the demands of not only data-intensive applications but also end users, developers and administrators. While sharing many of the same goals as previous distributed file systems such as scalability, reliability, and performance, it is also designed with the emphasis on compatibility, extensibility and autonomy. With the design goals in minds, we address several issues and present our design by adopting peer-to-peer technology, replication, multi-source data transfer, metadata caching and service-oriented architecture. The experimental results show the proposed distributed file system meet our design goals and will be useful in Cloud and Grid computing.