Aspects of the BBFS broadband filesystem

Summary form only given. As a consequence of improving technology, a new class of applications is emerging, characterized by intense demands on communications, computation, and data storage. BBFS is a broadband filesystem effort to explore ways of supporting these applications. A goal of BBFS is to simplify applications by absorbing data-intensive processing into the filesystem. To obtain behavioral extensibility, BBFS provides the notion of file types that encapsulate data structures and behaviors, such as structured files, version history files, spanned files that cross device boundaries, mirrored files, and active files containing data with associated functions