John H Howard

Digital Library

ACM Software System Award

USA - 2016

Andrew File System (AFS)

citation

For development of the pioneering and widely successful Andrew File System (AFS).

The Andrew File System (AFS) combined excellent engineering with several key ideas that have had long-lasting impact.  These include:  a well-defined and usable consistency model that used caching for scalability and performance, security based on cryptographic authentication, ACL-based authorization, on-wire data encryption, simplified administration through read-only volumes and server replication, a federated named space that enabled growth into a wide-area file system, and a portable OS-independent implementation.  AFS became widely used, and its development continues in OpenAFS.  The AFS ideas inspired much follow-on work, influencing later NFS standards and todays cloud-based file stores.

Press Release