CPA-CSA: Wisconsin Arrays in Software Project (WASP)

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Commodity systems are changing the face of storage and I/O. Commodity disks are cheap, but unreliable. Commodity file systems are widely used, but bug prone. Despite these critical problems, people rely increasingly on commodity computing systems to store data of critical importance, whether from an emotional (e.g., family photos), business (e.g., a customer database), or legal (e.g., your tax return) standpoint. The Wisconsin Arrays in Software Project (WASP) tackles the problem of building the next generation of robust and reliable commodity RAID system. Such a RAID system must be reliable, detecting and recovering from a broad range of disk faults correctly. Such a system must also integrate properly into existing systems, thus delivering high performance and proper recovery in the case of system crashes. Finally, such a system must be flexible, enabling new protection strategies to be developed and deployed to cope with new problems as they arise. WASP has two major components: the first is a RAID design checker known as Sting, which ensures that protection schemes correctly protect data from a given set of disk faults. The second is a framework to allow the specification and automatic generation of sophisticated RAID systems; known as WASP Nest, this part of the project promises a new higher-level design methodology for commodity RAIDs.