SBIR/STTR Phase I: Group Coding for Reliable High Performance Network-Centric Storage

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will study the feasibility of building a reliable, high-performance network-centric storage system technology (NetSTOR). NetSTOR's architecture is based on a new very fast group data coding (GC) scheme that will achieve efficient and dependable data delivery across the network. Recently, the need for network storage has burgeoned, without truly universal solutions being available. Phase I will evaluate the performance improvement achieved by NetSTOR's unique architecture and validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the GC technique. Efficient decoding algorithms will be employed to achieve reliability against server failure and faulty network connections. Multi-threaded parallel data transfer will ensure high performance data delivery. Automatic system reconfigurability will provide high data availability. The system will be application-aware addressing application specific issues such as cache management, data layout, and prefetching will be employed for performance optimization. Potential commercial applications of the proposed storage system include distributed web hosting, multi media network-based services, high performance computing, modeling and simulation, distributed information retrieval, and terrain visualization. Applications of group coding in areas other than data storage include mobile communication, reliable multicasting, audio/video streaming, and digital fountain systems will be considered.