Storage@home
Encyclopedia
Storage@home is a distributed storage
Distributed data store
A distributed data store is a blurred concept and means either a distributed database where users store their information on a number of nodes, or a network in which a user stores their information on a number of peer network nodes ....

 infrastructure designed to store massive amounts of scientific data across a large host of volunteer machines.
The project was developed by some of the Folding@home
Folding@home
Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to use spare processing power on personal computers to perform simulations of disease-relevant protein folding and other molecular dynamics, and to improve on the methods of doing so...

 team at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.

Function

Researchers such as the Pande Group (who run Folding@home) have to deal with massive amounts of data. This data must be stored and backed up, and this is very expensive. Traditionally, methods such as RAID
RAID
RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit...

 are used, but these become impractical at this scale. The Pande Group already has to deal with reliably storing hundreds of terabytes of scientific data, and this continually growing. Folding@home
Folding@home
Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to use spare processing power on personal computers to perform simulations of disease-relevant protein folding and other molecular dynamics, and to improve on the methods of doing so...

, Adam Beberg and Vijay Pande took cues from Folding@home and began work on Storage@home. The project is designed based on patterns extracted from Folding@home logs and experience with distributed computing. Significant amounts of information are acquired from the user, so as to maintain a robust network. Folding@home volunteers can easily participate in Storage@home, but quality donors are very important. Volunteers each donate 10 GB of storage space, and would hold encrypted files. These users gain points as a reward for reliable storage. Each file saved on the system is replicated four times, each spread across 10 geographically distant hosts.
Redundancy also occurs over different operating systems as well as across time zones. If a server detects the disappearance of an individual contributor, the data block held by that user would then be duplicated to others. Ideally, users would participate for a minimum of six months, and would alert the S@h server before certain changes on their end such as disappearance from S@h or a bandwidth downgrade. Data stored on Storage@home is maintained through redundancy and monitoring, with repairs done as needed. Through careful application of redundancy, encryption, digital signatures, automated monitoring and correction, large quantities of data could be reliably and easily retrieved. This ensures a robust network that will lose the least possible data.

Storage Resource Broker
Storage Resource Broker
Storage Resource Broker is a Data Grid Management System operating in many U.S. and international computational science research projects...

is the closest storage project to Storage@home.

Status

Storage@home has been inactive since 2009, despite initial plans for more to come.
On April 11, 2011 Professor Vijay Pande stated that "We currently do not have any active plans with Storage@home. We're concentrating on other areas at the moment."

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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