This project is being developed at Loyola University Chicago for Dr. George K. Thiruvathukal's Open Source Computing class

Computer storage requirements have grown, especially for research applications and internet application service providers. With the decrease in price in hardware and especially in storage, it is not uncommon to see computing clusters running in commodity hardware. There range from small networks to very large distributed computing clusters (see GFS from Google).

The goal of this project is to create a distributed file system in user space for Linux. This file system will be able to store an increased amount of storage distributed along several data nodes, and have its operations supported by metadata servers. It will also be more tolerant to failure since a file will have one or more replicas in different nodes.

For a more detailed description of the project, you can see the full proposal

A complete description of the project, with results and conclusions can be read in this paper