Faculty Advisor
Evangelos P. Markatos Assistant Professor

Grant
$14,000 on 2/12/97

Funding
To fund two students for one year and purchase some PCs with ATM network interfaces in order to develop a network RAM disk within a network of workstations to provide large, fast, reliable RAM disk.

Design & Implementation of a Network RAM Disk Abstract
In this project we design, implement and evaluate a device called Network RamDisk.

A Network RamDisk is a block device that consists of the all idle main memories in a Network of Workstations (NOW). It behaves like any other disk, allowing the creation of files and file systems on top of it. However, since it is implemented in main memory (RAM), it provides lower latency and higher bandwidth than most traditional magnetic disks.

In this project we will implement the Network RamDisk on the Digital Unix 4.0 and the Linux operating systems, as a block device driver without any modifications to the kernel code. In addition to the above we propose and implement various reliability policies, making the device tolerant to single workstation crashes.

We believe that a Network RamDisk can be efficiently used to provide reliable low-latency access to files, that would otherwise be stored on magnetic disks. 

Current Status as of 3/98
The first version of the driver has been implemented on Digital UNIX 4.0 and Linux (kernel version 2.0.30).
The second version of the driver (which uses reliable network memory storage) is currently underway.

Web Site
For information about the Network RamDisk, please see: https://www.ics.forth.gr/arch-vlsi/OS/usenix/nrd/nrd.html. A link to the code can be found at:
https://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/paging.html