Modeling and Verifying Google File System

Abstract

Google File System (GFS) is a distributed file system developed by Google for massive data-intensive applications. Its high aggregate performance of delivering massive data to many clients but the inexpensiveness of commodity hardware facilitate GFS to successfully meet the massive storage needs and be widely used in industries. In this paper, we first present a formal model of Google File System in terms of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP#), which precisely describes the un-derlying read/write behaviors of GFS. On that basis, both relaxed consistency and eventually consistency guaranteed by GFS may be revealed in our framework. Furthermore, the suggested CSP# model is encoded in Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT), thus several properties such as starvation-free and deadlock-free could be automatically checked and verified in the framework of formal methods.