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Colossus is actually the only project I can think of for which they had one of the leaders sit down with Kirk McKusick and have a chat for ACM Queue, instead of
by the-rc 7y ago
Colossus is actually the only project I can think of for which they had one of the leaders sit down with Kirk McKusick and have a chat for ACM Queue, instead of a paper. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1594206 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1594206
- jamesblonde 7y agoAnd they reveal exactly zero details. I know a bit about it, but not enough to say exactly what semantics it offers to file system clients. I believe it is not POSIX-like, hence the need to layer Spanner and GCS over it.
- the-rc 7y ago??? The original GFS paper, which the chat references repeatedly, was clear about the semantics not being POSIX-like. The interview mentions that, too, along with stuff like snapshots. Colossus is basically the same, with increased scalability.
- shereadsthenews 7y agoThere's been a teensy bit more details than that, e.g. [1]. If you think about exactly the file semantics that Bigtable would require (append, pread) that's exactly what is provided. Note that Colossus and D are two separate things. Google systems can use D without Colossus and a long time ago people used Colossus without D, although today Colossus/D is implied. The presentation gives the broad strokes of how Colossus is able to bootstrap itself from Chubby. It helps if you've also read the Bigtable paper [2]. 1: http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Keynote.pdf http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Ke... 2: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...