SHORE - A High-Performance, Scalable, Persistent Object System - TASK #2
- ORGANIZATION:
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- SUBCONTRACTORS:
- None
- PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
- David DeWitt, dewitt@cs.wisc.edu, 608-262-5776, 263-5489
- Michael Carey, carey@cs.wisc.edu, 608-262-5776, 262-2252
- TITLE OF EFFORT:
- SHORE - A High-Performance, Scalable, Persistent Object System - TASK #2
OBJECTIVE:
The objective of the SHORE project is to design, implement, and
evaluate a persistent object system that will serve the needs of a wide
variety of target applications including hardware and software CAD
systems, persistent programming languages, geographic information
systems, satellite data repositories, and multimedia applications.
Shore expands on the basic capabilities of the widely-used Exodus
Storage Manager (developed at Wisconsin, funded by ARPA) in a number of
ways including support for typed objects, multiple programming
languages, a "Unix-like" hierarchical name space for named objects, and
a Unix-compatible interface to objects with a "text" field. This
interface is intended to ease the transition of applications from the
Unix file system environment to Shore as existing Unix tools such as vi
and cc will be able to store their data in Shore objects without
modification (basically a Unix file becomes either a single Shore
object or the text field of a complex object).
SHORE is being targeted at a wide range of hardware environments,
scaling all the way from individual workstations to heterogeneous
client/server networks to large multiprocessors such as the Intel
Paragon.
Here is a
recent report describing the Shore project
. Further
information on Shore
is available on the
UW-Madison CS Department WWW server
.
PROGRESS:
The key components of Shore have been designed and are currently being
implemented. Initial versions of compiler for the type definition
language (SDL), the Shore storage manager are now operational, and the
language binding of SDL into C++ are now operational. The various
components of Shore are now sufficiently complete to support an
implementation of the OO7 object-oriented database system benchmark.
After some tuning, the performance looks like it will be quite
competitive.
We are currently working on extensions to the Shore server to permit
its operation on parallel processors such as the Intel Paragon. The
underlying communications package is completed and we are currently
designing various server-to-server caching algorithms. Concurrently, we
have designed and prototyped the application-program interface to
Parallel Shore.
Our goal is to release Version 1 of Shore in the June 1994 period.
RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
1) Publication of research papers on a variety of fundamental issues in
the design and implementation of persistent object stores.
2) At the request of TI, we extended the Exodus Storage Manager to
support transactions that span multiple, distributed instances of the
storage manager.
3) We have defined a new benchmark for persistent object stores, the
OO7 benchmark. We have implemented this benchmark on a number of
commercial OODBMS systems (Objectivity, ObjectStore, and Ontos) as well
as the Exodus storage manager. This benchmark has been and will
continue to be instrumental in helping us to understand the performance
of persistent object stores; furthermore, it appears to be gaining
acceptance as the standard benchmark for persistent object storage
systems.
FY-94 PLANS:
1) Complete implementation of Shore V1.0.
2) Complete implementation of a parallel file system for the Intel Paragon.
3) Continue to support current Exodus clients such as TI and Arcadia. Continue preparations for transition of such clients from Exodus to Shore.
TECHNOLOGY TRANSITION:
The Exodus Storage Manager is being used in a large number of projects
and some commercial products. Key ARPA projects using Exodus for their
basic object management needs include the Texas Instruments Open OODB
project, the Arcadia consortium, and the University of Utah. At the
request of TI, we extended Exodus to support distributed transactions
spanning multiple object servers. Exodus is also being used in a
multimedia product that is being developed by Ravi Technologies (a
Bay-area startup) and as the underlying object manager for the ATT Bell
Labs object-oriented database system ODE.
Both the
Exodus Storage Manager and a compiler for the E persistent
programming language
,
are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.wisc.edu.
No licenses are required.
If more information is needed contact
Mike Zwilling / zwilling@cs.wisc.edu.
All Shore software will be available through the same distribution
mechanism.
A report
(description and some performance numbers)
and implementations
(for E/Exodus and various commercial systems) ,
of the OO7 benchmark are available via anonymous ftp from
ftp.cs.wisc.edu. We have logged over 500 people pulling these files
over the net. Our hope is that making this material available will
further increase the transfer of information about persistent object
storage systems from researchers to practitioners.
DATE PREPARED:
15 April 1994
Michael Carey / carey@cs.wisc.edu.
Michael Zwilling / zwilling@cs.wisc.edu.