The Google File System
Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung

Abstract

We have designed and implemented the Google File System, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers high aggregate performance to a large number of clients.

While sharing many of the same goals as previous distributed file systems, our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and technological environment, both current and anticipated, that reflect a marked departure from some earlier file system assumptions. This has led us to reexamine traditional choices and explore radically different design points.

The file system has successfully met our storage needs. It is widely deployed within Google as the storage platform for the generation and processing of data used by our service as well as research and development efforts that require large data sets. The largest cluster to date provides hundreds of terabytes of storage across thousands of disks on over a thousand machines, and it is concurrently accessed by hundreds of clients.

In this paper, we present file system interface extensions designed to support distributed applications, discuss many aspects of our design, and report measurements from both micro-benchmarks and real world use.

Appeared in:
19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles,
Lake George, NY, October, 2003.