Section: Software and Platforms

BlobSeer

Participants : Zhe Li, Rohit Saxena, Alexandru Costan, Gabriel Antoniu, Luc Bougé.

Contact:

Gabriel Antoniu.

Presentation:

BlobSeer is the core software platform for most current projects of the KerData team. It is a data storage service specifically designed to deal with the requirements of large-scale data-intensive distributed applications that abstract data as huge sequences of bytes, called BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects). It provides a versatile versioning interface for manipulating BLOBs that enables reading, writing and appending to them.

BlobSeer offers both scalability and performance with respect to a series of issues typically associated with the data-intensive context: scalable aggregation of storage space from the participating nodes with minimal overhead, ability to store huge data objects, efficient fine-grain access to data subsets, high throughput in spite of heavy access concurrency, as well as fault-tolerance.

Users:

Work is currently in progress in several formalized projects (see previous section) to integrate and leverage BlobSeer as a data storage back-end in the reference cloud environments: a) Microsoft Azure; b) the Nimbus cloud toolkit developed at Argonne National Lab (USA); and c) the OpenNebula IaaS cloud toolkit developed at UCM (Madrid).

URL:

http://blobseer.gforge.inria.fr/

License:

GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3.

Status:

This software is available on Inria's forge. Version 1.0 (released late 2010) registered with APP: IDDN.FR.001.310009.000.S.P.000.10700.

A Technology Research Action (ADT, Action de recherche technologique) started in November 2012 for two years, aiming at robustifying the BlobSeer software and making it a safely distributable product. This project is funded by Inria Technological Development Office (D2T, Direction du Développement Technologique). Loïc Cloatre, has been hired as a senior engineer for the second year of this project, as a successor of Zhe Li, starting in February 2014.