Inspiration
After an exciting conversation with the XMOS sponsor, we conducted research into embedded systems and uses for parallel architectures. We followed this thread and it lead us to learn about realtime operating systems, XC, microchips and storage.
What it does
In industry operations, a critical part of storing data is to use multiple redundant disks. If one disk fails--which is common at large scales--its data is recovered using the other disks. Our system implements RAID 6, which allows for two disks to fail and for their data to still be recovered. We implemented this system on an (emulated) XMOS chip and used its inherently parallel architecture to optimise writing and recovery speeds. We also made a graphical user interface to show the status of the controller and disks.
How we built it
We used C's multithreading capabilities to run using XMOS's inherently parallel architecture. We used Flask to build a server which displays statistics about the controller and its drives.
Challenges we ran into
- Implementing fast recovery and writing to disk.
- Calculating parity and Reed-Solomon codes (for RAID 6).
- Using multithreading to make the RAID controller faster.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Multithreading
What we learned
- We learned how to produce software as a group in a short-time scale.
What's next for Revel X
Implementing the system on a real XMOS chip.
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