The Tiger Shark file system

Tiger Shark is a parallel file system for IBM's AIX operating system. It is designed to support interactive multimedia, particularly large-scale systems such as interactive television (ITV). Tiger Shark scales across the entire RS/6000 product line, from small desktop machines to the SP-2 parallel supercomputer. Tiger Shark's primary features are support for continuous time data, scalability, high availability, and manageability, all of which are crucial in its role in large-scale video servers. Interestingly, most of the features that make Tiger Shark a good video server are important for other large-scale applications such as technical computing, data mining, digital library, and scalable network file servers. This paper briefly describes Tiger Shark: the environment that makes it important, the key technology it embodies, and the efforts to build products based on it.