June 1-5, 2009

Speaker: Christopher Bayliss

Title: AFS within the nanoCMOS project

Abstract:

This talk will cover the adoption of AFS as the data storage layer in the EPSRC funded pilot project, Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) project (www.nanocmos.ac.uk). The nanoCMOS project is a research project lead by the University of Glasgow and involving numerous academic and major industrial bodies. It is investigating the decreasing scaling of transistor devices which have now reached nano-scale, and the impact this atomic scale has on variability throughout the semiconductor design process. This talk will provide a broad overview of nanoCMOS and cover in particular how AFS is being applied. This includes the nanoCMOS server AFS arrangements; how AFS is integrated into the wider e-Infrastructure with focus in particular on metadata and web service components of the project, and the way integrated security is supported to meet the commercial and research IP demands of this domain. We outline the various advantages and pitfalls of using AFS in this capacity. We describe our attempts at performance tuning both for individuals both locally and at partners as well as workers in the various separate clusters used. We describe the installation, usage and debugging issues associated with having a widely distributed user base with varying technical competency, local software and network policies.

The talk will also cover the integration of AFS with the various alternate security mechanisms used through out the project and how we have harmonized user access rights between them. It will also touch on the expansion of AFS usage from the nanoCMOS project out into other projects at Glasgow and its suitability for upcoming projects in a wider range of domains.

Slides:

PowerPoint

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