GassyFS : An In-Memory File System That Embraces Volatility

For many years storage systems were designed for slow storage devices. However, the average speed of these devices has been growing exponentially, making traditional storage system designs increasingly inadequate. Sufficient time must be dedicated to redesigning future storage systems or they might never adequately support fast storage devices using traditional storage semantics. In this paper, we argue that storage systems should expose a persistence-performance trade-off to applications that are willing to explicitly take control over durability. We describe our prototype system called GassyFS that stores file system data in distributed remote memory and provides support for checkpointing file system state. As a consequence of this design, we explore a spectrum of mechanisms and policies for efficiently sharing data across file system boundaries.