CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Facets: Exploring Semantic Equivalence of Files to Improve Storage Systems

智力优点：该提案的重点是以有效和可扩展的方式找到语义等效的文件。 如果两个文件相同，则它们是优化的候选对象，以降低存储成本、提高性能并总体改进系统。传统上，只有当两个文件逐字节相同时，它们才被认为是等效的-即，字节等价然而，该团队的初步研究表明，还有许多其他文件本质上是等效的，即使它们包含的字节不相同。该项目将研究如何找到这种情况，并利用语义等价而不是字节等价来执行优化。该项目将设计和实现一个框架Facets，它通过对本质上是彼此转换版本的文件进行优化来探索新的功能。许多优化和改进可以应用于语义等效的文件，包括： - 确保语义等同文件的安全性得到保护 - 简化各种格式、版本和版本的语义等效文件的备份和维护 - 使用语义等效的文件来提高性能、可靠性和可用性 - 重新生成语义等效的文件，以加快恢复和网络传输 - 根据性能或能源限制选择要访问哪些语义等效的文件该团队的初步研究表明，典型用户机器上5%的文件是原始内容。其余的是来自其他地方的文件副本或原始内容的各种衍生物。虽然利用这种观察来实现优势并不是微不足道的，但如果能够找到这些关系并适当利用它们，许多重大改进是可能的。这些改进包括增强的安全性、更高效的备份和恢复、更好的文件缓存、更智能地权衡性能与功耗，以及许多其他可能性。更广泛的影响：开发的代码和技术将以开源形式发布。该团队将采取措施（如申请补充REU赠款），让本科生参与研究。他们将在西班牙裔服务机构进行演讲和招聘。研究中的材料和概念将被纳入主要研究人员在其机构教授的课程中。

Intellectual Merit:The focus of the proposal is on finding semantically equivalent files in an efficient and scalable manner. If two files are identical, they are candidates for optimizations to reduce storage costs, increase performance, and generally improve the system. Traditionally, two files are only considered equivalent if they are byte-by-byte identical - i.e., byte equivalence. However, this team's preliminary research shows that there are many other files that are essentially equivalent, even though the bytes they contain are not the same. This proposal will investigate how to find such cases and perform optimizations that make use of semantic equivalence, rather than byte equivalence.This project will design and implement a framework, Facets, which explores new capabilities by applying optimizations to files that are essentially transformed versions of each other. Many optimizations and improvements can be applied to semantically equivalent files, including: -Ensuring that the security of semantically equivalent files is preserved -Easing backup and maintenance of semantically equivalent files in various formats, fidelities, and versions -Using semantically equivalent files to improve performance, reliability, and availability -Regenerating semantically equivalent files to speed up recovery and network transfer -Selecting which semantically equivalent files to access according to performance or energy constraintsThis team's preliminary research shows that 5% of files on a typical user's machine are original content. The rest are copies of files from elsewhere or various derivatives of original content. While leveraging this observation to achieve advantages is not trivial, many significant improvements are possible if one can find these relationships and make proper use of them. These improvements include enhanced security, more efficient backup and restoration, better file caching, more intelligent tradeoffs in performance versus power use, and a host of other possibilities. Broader Impacts: The code and techniques developed will be released in open source form. The team will take steps (such as applying for supplemental REU grants) to involve undergraduates in the research. They will give talks and recruit at Hispanic-serving institutions. Materials and concepts from the research will be incorporated into classes taught by the principal investigators at their institutions.