Distributed file management techniques based on an autonomous decentralized system concept

Distributed computer systems have been the subject of a large amount of research and development. From the standpoint of system construction and expansion, it is necessary that a computer system is flexible and tolerant enough for a change of system structure. A computer system is also required to be easily operated by users regardless of its structure and status. This paper presents techniques for file management in a distributed computer system to fulfil these requirements based on the Autonomous Decentralized System Concept. The proposed techniques achieve the autonomy of each computer unit and autonomous cooperation among these computer units in a distributed file system. These techniques realize flexible fault-tolerance of each file according to the degree of its importance. Additionally, one of the applications of the proposed techniques is also shown in this paper.