SmartStore: A New Metadata Organization Paradigm with

Existing storage systems using hierarchical directory tree do not meet scalability and functionality requirements for expo-nentially growing datasets and increasingly complex queries in Exabyte-level systems with billions of files. This paper pro-poses semantic-aware organization, called SmartStore, which exploits metadata semantics of files to judiciously aggre-gate correlated files into semantic-aware groups by using in-formation retrieval tools. Decentralized design improves sys-tem scalability and reduces query latency for complex queries (range and top-k queries), which is conducive to construct-ing semantic-aware caching, and conventional filename-based query. SmartStore limits search scope of complex query to a single or a minimal number of semantically related groups and avoids or alleviates brute-force search in entire system