[ExI] Techie question: best/fastest WAN file system solution

[Samantha Atkins]

On Aug 2, 2008, at 7:19 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:

> On Saturday 02 August 2008, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>> One thing that I grapple with a lot is how i/we can use network
>> resources efficiently in at least small steps towards extending our
>> brains via hardware and the network.   One aspect of this is looking
>
> There's a few ways that I've been considering for storing brain  
> related
> information, especially in neurofeedback datasets and MRI datasets and
> the like. The tricky part is extracting value out of it ... as in,
> semantic value, or doing something interesting with data dumped from
> your brain. You could try training artificial neural networks to act
> like small regions of your own functionality :-) which is something
> that Thomas DeMarse has shown relevant technology for.
>

Tasty grist for the mental mill.  Thanks for the reference.
>
> Hey, want to implement DeMarse's work with Amazon's S3? That would be
> worth a paper or two.
>

It would be interesting to play with highly specialized Linux images  
in the Amazon compute cloud.  Each of those comes with quite a bit of  
disk space.   And the images can be cloned freely to give needed  
scalability.  S3 would be a good shared store and source of inherited  
knowledge across instances.   I don't know enough about DeMarse's work  
to really understand if this is worth considering.  It is a ways away  
from my own interest areas.

>
> There's a few solutions for this specifically so that there are file
> systems extended across the network, so that cached reads/writes occur
> and so on, but generally there's nothing that is working as well as it
> really should be and you're rightly worried. I know a few individuals
> that I can put you in contact with regarding distributed file systems
> (freenet was at one point somewhat like this).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu <-- pipe dream ;-)
>

Freenet had a lot of other agendas especially freedom to persist  
whatever anyone wished without snooping and consequences imposed by  
others.    As a result some function such as efficiently finding  
information and link following were compromised.   In any case I don't  
know of a freenet-FS (a la Fuse).

Perhaps FreeNet or Xanadu have some available pieces to work from if  
one is out to build a solution.  I may have to cobble together my own  
but I need something really efficient for this yesterday.

- samantha