The Galaxy Filesystem is a distributed read-only filesystem designed to allow communication between any pair of nodes on the Internet.  Specifically, we target NATed or firewalled nodes which traditionally cannot communicate without the use of a third-party or waypoint.  Using PlanetLab as a set of waypoints, we have developed a distributed load-balancing algorithm to maximize throughput of the peer-to-peer filesystem traffic.  For the client interface to Galaxy, we have developed the Galaxy Filesystem Toolkit which provides a Windows Explorer interface to the filesystem.

Fred Annexstein, Kenneth A. Berman, Svetlana Strunjas, and Chad Yoshikawa.  Maximizing Throughput in Minimum Rounds in an Application-Level Relay Service.  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Algorithm Engineering & Experiments (ALENEX), January 2007.[pdf]

Fred Annexstein, Kenneth A. Berman, Svetlana Strunjas, and Chad Yoshikawa.  Adaptive Client-Server Load Balancing using Persistent Demands.  Technical Report ECECS-TR-2006-6, University of Cincinnati, July 2006. [pdf] [bibtex]

Chad Yoshikawa, Fred Annexstein, and Kenneth A. Berman.  The Galaxy Filesystem Toolkit:  Providing Windows Explorer Access to Custom Data.  Technical Report ECECS-TR-2006-7, University of Cincinnati, July 2006 [pdf]

Chad Yoshikawa, Brent Chun, and Amin Vahdat. The Lonely NATed Node. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop 2004, September 2004.[pdf]

Chad Yoshikawa, Brent Chun, and Amin Vahdat. Distributed Hash Queues: Architecture and Design.  In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, July 2004 [pdf]

Galaxy Filesystem Toolkit - An open-source toolkit for Windows which allows users to connect Windows Explorer to any data source, e.g. NFS servers or custom data.  This is analogous to user-level filesystem toolkits for Unix, but it is not a strict 'filesystem' since only Windows Explorer and Windows-based applications can access the filesystem.  However, it currently is the only available filesystem extension toolkit for Windows.  Currently, file system extensions for Windows can be developed in Java, C#, and C++.

Questions/Comments -- contact Chad Yoshikawa