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by donporter 1664 days ago
As one of the authors of this project, first off, I appreciate the interest.

For those who are curious, our initial goal is indeed to build a PoC and understand whether the data structures actually deliver the potential performance gains in a realistic implementation that one might expect on paper. I see a long arc from a new idea to a production-quality implementation, and several iterations of increasingly thorough evaluation and hardening.

Our current prototype is not production-ready; this is a long-term goal, but we appreciate how much work this is. More of our focus at the moment is on exploring other ways these algorithmic techniques may be useful in a storage system or how to address current problems---i.e., understanding the best way to design such a system before trying to build a production-quality version. Each of our papers has yielded significant overhauls to the design.

We would also consider it a success if other file systems adopted any ideas from our papers, or a new file system were designed by someone else that adopted these techniques.

The commenters are right that there is a gap between when an idea is exciting new research and fundable via grants versus funding the "maturing" phase of the prototype. I will hasten to say that the NSF has been supportive of maturing this system, for which we are most grateful. Nonetheless, like many projects, we could use more resources, and I would be happy to engage constructive conversations out-of-band about how to address this gap.

3 comments

Since you're answering questions here, what is the impact of the patents on the fractal tree for other implimentations? Are other projects legally allowed to implement their own fractal/B^epsilon trees?
Looking forward to the results of your work, good luck and thank you!
(This comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29404038 but I've detached it so that more people will see it—the other thread has been moderated since it's a tedious flamewar.)