In this talk, I will describe EnsemBlue, a distributed file system for personal multimedia that incorporates both general purpose computers and consumer electronics devices. I will first discuss our initial experiences using a distributed file system to store personal multimedia, and highlight some of the shortcomings we found in existing file systems. I will then discuss how we designed EnsemBlue to address those shortcomings. EnsemBlue leverages the capabilities of a few general purpose computers to make consumer electronics devices first class clients of the file system. It allows namespace diversity by translating between its distributed namespace and the local namespaces of consumer electronics devices. It supports extensibility through persistent queries, a robust event notification mechanism that leverages the underlying cache consistency mechanisms of the file system. Finally, it enables mobile clients to self-organize and share data through device ensembles. Our results show that these additional features impose little overhead, yet they enable the integration of emerging computing platforms such as digital cameras, MP3 players, and DVRs.

Host: Lin Zhong lzhong@rice.edu

Biography of Jason Flinn:
Jason Flinn is the Morris Wellman faculty development assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of Michigan. His research interests include mobile computing, operating systems, and distributed systems.  Jason earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2004, and his papers have received best paper awards from several conferences, including SOSP and OSDI.