Weihan Wang's Home Page

The number of powerful consumer electronics around us will be astonishingly high in five years; local networks will be pervasive in ten years, too. However, is the software layer ready to welcome this "digital explosion"? In particular, how can average users manage their own data, applications, and computing/storage resources that will be widely, loosely, and autonomously distributed in their devices?

In this talk, I will present the scientific and engineering aspects of SyncFS, a decentralized, optimistic replication file system, as an initial attempt to address the above issues. SyncFS categorizes a user's devices into replicas and caches; every device can perform updates even when disconnected. SyncFS propagates updates using an improved epidemic protocol and detect conflicts using a novel approach called version strings. Comparing to traditional approaches like vector timestamps and causal histories, version strings provide light-weight membership management as well as incremental transfer. Other techniques are also used to improve simplicity, scalability and performance of the system. SyncFS requires no servers or master replicas and is based on network overlay techniques; it works well even if the user's networks are highly dynamic or isolated from infrastructural networks. Visit syncfs.com for more information.

A hands-on/demo session will be given after the talk.