Chirp

Chirp is a user-level file system for collaboration across distributed systems such as clusters, clouds, and grids. Chirp allows ordinary users to discover, share, and access storage, whether within a single machine room or over a wide area network.

Chirp requires no special privileges. Unlike most standard filesystems or storage services, Chirp does not require root access, kernel changes, special modules, or anything like that. It can be run by ordinary users to export ordinary filesystems on any machine or port that you like.

Chirp is transparent. When used with Parrot or FUSE, Chirp servers can be transparently attached to existing ordinary applications -- like tcsh, vi, and perl -- without any sort of kernel changes or special privileges. Chirp is designed to give maximum compatibility with standard Unix semantics.

Chirp is easy to deploy. Chirp is designed to be deployed with a minimum of fuss. One simple command starts a Chirp server or a Chirp client. There is no complex configuration, installation, or setup to mess up. It just works. This makes Chirp ideal for on-the-fly storage management in batch computing and grid computing environments.

Documentation

Software and Systems

Publications

  • Douglas Thain, Michael Albrecht, Hoang Bui, Peter Bui, Rory Carmichael, Scott Emrich, and Patrick Flynn,
    Data Intensive Computing with Clustered Chirp Servers,
    Tevfik Kosar, Data Intensive Distributed Computing: Challenges and Solutions for Large Scale Information Management, pages 140-154, IGI, January, 2012. ISBN: 9781615209712

  • Patrick Donnelly, Peter Bui, Douglas Thain,
    Attaching Cloud Storage to a Campus Grid Using Parrot, Chirp, and Hadoop ,
    IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, pages 488-495, November, 2010. DOI: 10.1109/CloudCom.2010.74

  • Rory Carmichael, Patrick Braga-Henebry, Douglas Thain, and Scott Emrich,
    Biocompute: Toward a Collaborative Workspace for Data Intensive Bio-Science,
    Workshop on Emerging Computational Methods for Life Sciences at ACM HPDC 2010, pages 489-498, June, 2010. DOI: 10.1145/1851476.1851547

  • T. Kosar, A. Hutanu, J. McLaren and D. Thain,
    Coordination of Access to Large-scale Datasets in Distributed Environments,
    A. Shoshani and D. Rotem, Scientific Data Management: Challenges, Existing Technology, and Deployment, Chapman and Hall / CRC Press, August, 2009. ISBN: 978-1420069808

  • Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, and Jeffrey Hemmes,
    Chirp: A Practical Global Filesystem for Cluster and Grid Computing,
    Journal of Grid Computing, 7(1), pages 51-72, March, 2009. DOI: 10.1007/s10723-008-9100-5

  • Douglas Thain and Christopher Moretti,
    Efficient Access to Many Small Files in a Filesystem for Grid Computing,
    IEEE Grid Computing, pages 243-250, September, 2007. DOI: 10.1109/GRID.2007.4354139

  • Christopher Moretti,
    Flexible Object Based Filesystems for Scientific Computing,
    M.S. Thesis, University of Notre Dame, April, 2007.

  • Douglas Thain,
    Operating System Support for Space Allocation in Grid Storage Systems,
    IEEE Grid Computing, pages 104-111, September, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/ICGRID.2006.311004

  • Jeffrey Hemmes and Douglas Thain,
    Cacheable Decentralized Groups for Grid Resource Access Control,
    IEEE Grid Computing, pages 192-199, September, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/ICGRID.2006.311015

  • Sudharshan Vazhkudai, Douglas Thain, Xiaosong Ma, and Vincent Freeh,
    Positioning Dynamic Storage Caches for Transient Data,
    Workshop on High-Performance I/O Techniques and Deployment of Very Large Scale I/O Systems at IEEE Cluster Computing, pages 1-9, September, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/CLUSTR.2006.311900

  • Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, Paul Madrid, Phil Snowberger, and Jeff Hemmes,
    The Consequences of Decentralized Security in a Cooperative Storage System,
    Workshop on Security in Storage at IEEE FAST, pages 82-94, December, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/SISW.2005.11

  • Douglas Thain, Sander Klous, Justin Wozniak, Paul Brenner, Aaron Striegel, and Jesus Izaguirre,
    Separating Abstractions from Resources in a Tactical Storage System ,
    IEEE/ACM Supercomputing, pages 55-67, November, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/SC.2005.64

  • Justin Wozniak, Paul Brenner, Douglas Thain, Aaron Striegel, and Jesus Izaguirre,
    Generosity and Gluttony in GEMS: Grid Enabled Molecular Simulations,
    IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, pages 191-200, June, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/HPDC.2005.1520959

    • Cooperative Computing Lab - CSE Department - Notre Dame