Undergraduate Students Roll Out Disaster-Resistant File System

Computer Science undergraduates Ryan McGovern and Chris Siebert have written and released a distributed, disaster-resistant file system they call 'Mimir'. Mimir, named for a primal god of Norse mythology, is based on the recent algorithmic breakthrough of rateless, erasure codes developed by Michael Luby. Their system is running currently on several dozen machines, and creates a dynamic multi-terabyte storage cluster that is immune to failure rates of over 50%-a remarkable achievement. Ryan and Chris maintain a blog site with more information about Mimir at www.lerao.com.