Date of Award

5-2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Computer Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Ligon, Walter B

Committee Member

Brooks , Richard R

Committee Member

Hoover , Adam W

Abstract

As the size and scale of supercomputers continues to increase at an
exponential rate the number of users on a given supercomputer will
only grow larger. A larger number of users on a supercomputer places a
greater importance on the strength of information security. Nowhere is
this requirement for security more apparent than the file system, as
users expect their data to be protected from accidental or deliberate
modification.
In spite of the ever-increasing demand for more secure file system
access the majority of parallel file systems do not implement a robust
security protocol for fear it will negatively impact the performance
and scalability of the file system. We provide a capability-based
security protocol for use in high-performance parallel file systems that is
capable of meeting the performance and scalability requirements of
current and future supercomputers. We develop a reference
implementation for the Parallel Virtual File System and
show its performance characteristics using several
microbenchmarks. Our test results show that capability-based security
is capable of protecting access to parallel file system objects, in
some cases with little overhead.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.