Towards a national collaboratory: an Internet file system

Jade is a distributed file system that provides a uniform way to name and access files in an Internet environment. It makes three important contributions. First, Jade integrates a heterogeneous collection of existing file systems, where heterogeneous means that the underlying physical file systems support different file access protocols. It is designed under the restriction that the underlying file systems may not be modified. Secondly, the system is partitioned into a collection of per-user, autonomous, well-balanced, logical file systems, each of which consists of a set of physical file systems and a dedicated private, logical name space. Finally, the author presents a global, Internet-wide name space that is built on top of Jade without any modification of the file system