Michael West

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

2016 ACM Software System Award

Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Michael L. Kazar, Robert N. Sidebotham, David A. Nichols, Michael J. West, John H. Howard, Alfred Z. Spector and Sherri M. Nichols were honored for developing the Andrew File System (AFS). AFS was the first distributed file system designed for tens of thousands of machines, and pioneered the use of scalable, secure and ubiquitous access to shared file data. To achieve the goal of providing a common shared file system used by large networks of people, AFS introduced novel approaches to caching, security, management and administration. AFS is still in use today as both an open source system and as the file system in commercial applications. It has also inspired several cloud-based storage applications.

The 2016 Software System Award recipients designed and built the Andrew File System in the 1980s while working as a team at the Information Technology Center (ITC), a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and IBM. Many other universities soon integrated AFS before it was introduced as a commercial application. Many of this year’s recipients also contributed to two foundational AFS papers: The ITC Distributed File System: Principles and Design, published in Proceedings of ACM SOSP 1985 and Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System, published in Proceedings of ACM SOSP 1987.

The ACM Software System Award is presented to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. The Software System Award carries a prize of $35,000. Financial support for the Software System Award is provided by IBM.