The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 27, 1999
Filed:
Jun. 16, 1997
Ab Initio Software Corporation, Concord, MA (US);
Abstract
A parallel virtual file system for parallel processing systems including single-processor systems having multiple storage devices. The invention manages partitioned files as follows: (1) partitions of a partitioned file are stored in a set of isomorphic 'data trees'; (2) an additional directory tree, called the 'control tree', is used to build a model of the intended structure of the data trees; (3) the combination of a control tree and a collection of data trees is referred to as a 'multifile system', with sets of files referred to as 'multifile' and sets of directories referred to as 'multi-directories;' data elements of a multifile or multidirectory are referred to as 'data plies' and control elements of a multifile or multidirectory are referred to as 'control plies'; (4) a set of multifile subroutines is provided for accessing and modifying the multifile system in such a way so as to preserve the isomorphic data structures for the partitioned data; (5) the multifile subroutines use a distributed computing environment which provides for remote procedure calls and, in one of the embodiments of the invention, for a distributed transaction processing protocol to ensure atomicity of structural changes to the multifile system; (6) interference of concurrent file system operations is prevented by creating a 'transactional' lock for each file system.