Abstract

I will be presenting a review and critique of the paper,
IVY: A READ/WRITE PEER-TO-PEER FILE SYSTEM

http://static.usenix.org/events/osdi02/tech/full_papers/muthitacharoen/muthitacharoen.pdf.

Ivy is a multi-user read/write peer-to-peer file system that decentralized
peer-to-peer data storage system. It has the ability to provide integrity
properties to its users, while not requiring trust of other users in the system.  

Below you will see an abstract published by the authors:

Ivy is a multi-user read/write peer-to-peer file system. Ivy has no centralized
or dedicated components, and it provides useful integrity properties without
requiring users to fully trust either the underlying peer-to-peer storage system
or the other users of the file system.

An Ivy file system consists solely of a set of logs, one log per participant.
Ivy stores its logs in the DHash distributed hash table. Each participant finds
data by consulting all logs, but performs modifications by appending only to its
own log. This arrangement allows Ivy to maintain meta-data consistency without
locking. Ivy users can choose which other logs to trust, an appropriate arrangement
in a semi-open peer-to-peer system.

Ivy presents applications with a conventional file system interface. When the
underlying network is fully connected, Ivy provides NFS-like semantics, such as
close-to-open consistency. Ivy detects conflicting modifications made during a
partition, and provides relevant version information to application-specific
conflict resolvers. Performance measurements on a wide-area network show that
Ivy is two to three times slower than NFS.