Mike Hibler, Leigh Stoller, Jay Lepreau, Robert Ricci, Chad Barb
The Flux Research Group
School of Computing, University of Utah
50 S. Central Campus Drive Rm. 3190
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9205
We present Frisbee, a system for saving, transferring, and installing entire disk images, whose goals are speed and scalability in a LAN environment. Among the techniques Frisbee uses are an appropriately-adapted method of filesystem-aware compression, a custom application-level reliable multicast protocol, and flexible application-level framing. This design results in a system which can rapidly and reliably distribute a disk image to many clients simultaneously. For example, Frisbee can write a total of 50 gigabytes of data to 80 disks in 34 seconds on commodity PC hardware. We describe Frisbee's design and implementation, review important design decisions, and evaluate its performance.
Full paper appeared in Proceedings of the 2003 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 2003:
The slides from the USENIX talk:
The Frisbee software is available in source form... and it builds and should run for you.