I have officially started working on my thesis today at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). So what is my thesis about? Well, I will be continuing work on a project I was already doing during the last semester. We basically aim to make the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Namenode highly available and horizontally scalable. If you are curious about how we are doing it, you can read about it here and here, or you can see the presentation here.

At the moment, I am trying to understand the techniques used by file systems (like ext3, ext4, Btrfs, XFS, ReiserFS, Haystack (Facebook), Cosmos (Microsoft), CloudStore) for inodes/block management, reliability and efficiency. Reading is boring, but it will give me a good idea of things to keep in mind while I am writing code.

I will also give a talk about these file systems next week, and will also post it here.