The reading for today is "Disk system architectures for high performance computing" by Katz et al., reading #28. Sections I through IV can be skimmed; the key section to focus on is Section V. (If you aren't familiar with how disks work, it is worth reading the first four paragraphs of section II carefully and also paying a little, but not much, more attention to section IV.)
The second design project will be available today on the Web. Read it and form a 3-person team with two other students as soon as possible, and send an e-mail message to your recitation instructor some time before next Thursday listing the members of your team. Note that the student page of the 6.033 Web site contains an up-to-date list of potential team members.
All students in a team should have the same recitation instructor, since he/she will be grading your project paper. See the design project 2 handout for more details.
We will hand out example questions for Quiz 2 today. Quiz 2 is next Friday (April 18).
Second lecture on storage. Read Tanenbaum chapter 4, up to and including section 4.3.
The readings are sections from reading #29, "Embedded Inodes and explicit grouping: exploiting disk bandwidth for small files" by Ganger and Kaashoek. Focus on Sections 1 through 3.
For your reading assignment answer the following question:
Describe how the incommensurate scaling of disk latency as compared to disk bandwidth has impacted the design of CFFS? Illustrate your point by giving two examples of differences in design of CFFS as compared with traditional UNIX approach described in lecture and discussed in Tanenbaum section 4.3.
This is the last lecture on file systems; it covers distributed file systems. In preparation, read Tanenbaum chapter 13 through section 13.2.4.
System aphorism of the week
KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
6.033 Handout 25, issued 4/8/96