Copernicus: A Scalable, High-Performance Semantic File System

Hierarchical file systems do not effectively meet the needs of users at the petabyte-scale. Users need dynamic, search-based file access in order to properly manage and use their growing sea of data. This paper presents the design of Copernicus, a new scalable, semantic file system that provides a searchable namespace for billions of files. Instead of augmenting a traditional file system with a search index, Copernicus uses a dynamic, graph-based file system design that indexes file attributes and relationships to provide scalable search and navigation of files.