SCALABLE CAPABILITY-BASED AUTHORIZATION FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE PARALLEL FILE SYSTEMS

As the size and scale of supercomputers continues to increase at an exponential rate the number of users on a given supercomputer will only grow larger. A larger number of users on a supercomputer places a greater importance on the strength of information security. Nowhere is this requirement for security more apparent than the file system, as users expect their data to be protected from accidental or deliberate modification. In spite of the ever-increasing demand for more secure file system access the majority of parallel file systems do not implement a robust security protocol for fear it will negatively impact the performance and scalability of the file system. We provide a capability-based security protocol for use in high-performance parallel file systems that is capable of meeting the performance and scalability requirements of current and future supercomputers. We develop a reference implementation for the Parallel Virtual File System [3] and show its performance characteristics using several microbenchmarks. Our test results show that capability-based security is capable of protecting access to parallel file system objects, in some cases with little overhead.