Distributed schedule management in the Tiger video fileserver

Abstract

Tiger is a scalable, fault-tolerant video file server constructed from a collection of computers connected by a switched network. All content files are striped across all of the computers and disks in a Tiger system. In order to prevent conflicts for a particular resource between two viewers, Tiger schedules viewers so that they do not require access to the same resource at the same time. In the abstract, there is a single, global schedule that describes all of the viewers in the system. In practice, the schedule is distributed among all of the computers in the system, each of which has a possibly partially inconsistent view of a subset of the schedule. By using such a relaxed consistency model for the schedule, Tiger achieves scalability and fault tolerance while still providing the consistent, coordinated service required by viewers.