Storage Systems - Projects - GPFS - Tiger Shark

GPFS is the product version of the Tiger Shark file system, developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Tiger Shark is designed to support interactive multimedia, particularly large-scale systems such as interactive television (ITV), on machines ranging from small desktop computers to scalable cluster machines such as the IBM RS/6000 SP.

Tiger Shark incorporates numerous features that enable it to support scalable, high-quality delivery of multimedia content, including:

• Quality of Service (QOS) - Tiger Shark manages system resources to assure adequate bandwidth is available for each multimedia stream. Disk I/O is scheduled to assure smooth delivery.
• Shared Disk Model - Tiger Shark allows multiple streaming servers to share content on switch-attached disks. On the SP, switch-attached disks are implemented using the Virtual Shared Disk (VSD) subsystem. Tiger Shark stripes files across tens or even hundreds of shared disks for load balancing and high throughput.
• High Availability - Tiger Shark uses journaling to allow it to recover from node failure, and supports block-level replication or (through VSD) dual-attached disks to recover from disk failure.

Technology Transfer

Tiger Shark has been deployed in video-on-demand and ITV trials at Bell Atlantic, Hong Kong Telecom, Tokyo Metropolitan Government and others. Tiger Shark is the file system in the IBM Content Manager VideoCharger video server.

Tiger Shark - a scalable file system for multimedia, Roger Haskin, IBM Journal of Research and Development,Vol. 42 No. 2, March 1998, pp. 185-197. (Acrobat PDF, 308KB)

The Tiger Shark File System, Roger Haskin and Frank Schmuck, PowerPoint presentation describing Tiger Shark. (Acrobat PDF, 457KB)

The Tiger Shark File System, Roger Haskin and Frank Schmuck, Proceedings of IEEE 1996 Spring COMPCON, Santa Clara, CA, Feb.1996. (Acrobat PDF, 159KB)

A System for the Delivery of Interactive Television Programming, Roger Haskin and Frank Stein, Proceedings of IEEE 1995 Spring COMPCON, San Francisco, CA, Mar. 1995, pp. 209-214. (Acrobat PDF, 139KB)

The Shark Continuous Media File Server, Roger Haskin, Proceedings of IEEE 1993 Spring COMPCON, San Francisco, CA, Feb. 1993, pp. 12-17. (Acrobat PDF, 44.4KB)