Jessica Ellis

Papers

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About

Jessica Ellis has made foundational contributions to high-performance distributed storage systems, particularly through her work on scalable, secure file-access architectures. Her most-cited paper, "An AFS-based mass storage system at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center" (2002, 12 citations), details the implementation of an extended Andrew File System (AFS) that provides transparent, locally cached, and secure access to a universal file namespace across diverse UNIX platforms. This system, deployed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), addressed critical challenges in managing massive datasets for scientific computing, enabling researchers to seamlessly access and share data across wide-area networks. Ellis’s work integrated AFS extensions to support the high-throughput and reliability demands of supercomputing environments, establishing a model for distributed mass storage that influenced subsequent large-scale data management projects. Her research bridges the gap between file system theory and practical, production-ready infrastructure, demonstrating how robust caching and security mechanisms can democratize access to computational resources. By tackling the scalability and usability of storage systems, Ellis has helped lay the groundwork for modern data-intensive science, where transparent, high-performance access to petabytes of information is essential.