Tiger Shark File System

Tiger Shark is a parallel file system for IBM's AIX Operating System that has been developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Tiger Shark is designed to support interactive multimedia, particularly large-scale systems such as interactive television (ITV). Tiger Shark scales across the entire RS/6000 product line, from small desktop machines to the SP-2 parallel supercomputer. The recently-announced IBM Multimedia LAN Server for AIX is based on the Tiger Shark file system.

Tiger Shark Customer Trials and Joint Studies include:

Bell Atlantic Video on Demand Field Trial

Shark (a predecessor of Tiger Shark) on an RS/6000 delivering 50 simultaneous 1.5Mbit/sec MPEG streams via ADSL to 400 field trial participants in Alexandria, VA (1993-1994).

Hong Kong Telecom Video on Demand Trial

Tiger Shark on three RS/6000s delivering 150 simultaneous 1.5Mbit/sec streams via ADSL to trial customers (1995).

Argonne National Labs

Tiger Shark on a 28-node SP-2 delivering 4.5Mbit/sec M-JPEG video to workstation clients via an ATM WAN (MBone) using a modified version of the VIC conferencing system. This system was demonstrated at Supercomputing '95.

Indiana University School of Music Library

Variations Project - a digital library project using Tiger Shark on an RS/6000 to deliver digital audio and video to 130+ PC and Mac clients over an ATM network via NFS protocol.

Publications and related material:

• Roger Haskin, The Shark Continuous Media File Server, Proceedings of IEEE 1993 Spring COMPCON, San Fransisco, CA, Feb. 1993, pp. 12-17.
• Roger Haskin and Frank Stein, A System for the Delivery of Interactive Television Programming, Proceedings of IEEE 1995 Spring COMPCON, San Fransisco, CA, Mar. 1995, pp. 209-214.
• Roger Haskin and Frank Schmuck, The Tiger Shark File System, Proceedings of IEEE 1996 Spring COMPCON, Santa Clara, CA, Feb. 1996.
• Roger Haskin, The Tiger Shark File System, PowerPoint presentation describing Tiger Shark.

Project Members: Roger Haskin (manager), Tom Engelsiepen, Carol Hartman, Dan McNabb, Mike Roberts, Frank Schmuck, Jim Wyllie

Contact: Roger Haskin (roger@almaden.ibm.com, (408) 927-1843, fax (408) 927-4096