Storage@home was a

distributed data store A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a ''numb ...

project designed to store massive amounts of scientific data across a large number of volunteer machines. The project was developed by some of the

Folding@home Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements ...

team at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, from about 2007 through 2011.

Function

Scientists such as those running

deal with massive amounts of data, which must be stored and backed up, and this is very expensive. Traditionally, methods such as storing the data on

RAID RAID (; redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical Computer data storage, data storage components into one or more logical units for th ...

servers are used, but these become impractical for research budgets at this scale. Pande's research group already dealt with storing hundreds of terabytes of scientific data. Professor

Vijay Pande Vijay Satyanand Pande is a Trinidadian–American scientist and venture capitalist. Pande is best known for orchestrating the distributed computing protein-folding research project known as Folding@home. His research is focused on distributed co ...

and student Adam Beberg took experience from Folding@home and began work on Storage@home. The project is designed based on the

distributed file system A clustered file system (CFS) is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously Mount (computing), mounted on multiple Server (computing), servers. There are several approaches to computer cluster, clustering, most of which do not emplo ...

known as Cosm, and the workload and analysis needed for Folding@home results. While Folding@home volunteers can easily participate in Storage@home, much more disk space is needed from the user than

, to create a robust network. Volunteers each donate 10 GB of storage space, which 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 and across time zones. If the servers detect the disappearance of an individual contributor, the data blocks held by that user would then be automatically duplicated to other hosts. Ideally, users would participate for a minimum of six months, and would alert the Storage@home servers before certain changes on their end such as a planned move of a machine or a bandwidth downgrade. Data stored on Storage@home was 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 (SRB) is data grid management computer software used in computational science research projects. SRB is a logical distributed file system based on a client-server architecture which presents users with a single global log ...

is the closest storage project to Storage@home.

Status

Storage@home was first made available on September 15, 2009, in a testing phase. It first monitored availability data and other basic statistics on the user's machine, which would be used to create a robust and capable storage system for storing massive amounts of scientific data. However, in the same year it became inactive, despite initial plans for more to come. On April 11, 2011, Pande stated his group had no active plans with Storage@home.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Storage at home Distributed computing projects Distributed file systems

Function

Status

See also

References