Publication of The Google File System (GFS) paper

Google researchers published their paper detailing GFS, a scalable distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware, laying out principles of master-slave architecture, block storage, and data replication.

Significance

This paper was the intellectual precursor and direct inspiration for Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella to build HDFS for the Nutch project, revealing how Google tackled large-scale storage.

Key facts

Date
2003-10-01
Type
invention
Location
Google Inc., Mountain View, California, USA