When SEER is operational, a computer user who works on a workstation (or connected to a network with file servers) while in the office, but on a portable machine while traveling, will be assured that his portable computer will always, transparently, hold the files he needs to do his work. By observing his usage patterns while working in a connected environment, SEER will be able to fill the hard disk of his portable machine with the necessary files. SEER makes the lack of network connectivity while working on a portable machine transparent, at least from the point of view of file access.
SEER is part of the larger Travler research project, which is developing distributed and mobile filing environments for 21st-century computers.
SEER observes the user's references to files and feeds these to a special correlator process. The correlator uses this information to infer relationships between various pairs of files, and encodes these as distance estimates. These estimates are then fed to a cache manager, which uses them (along with other information, such as directory membership) to discover which projects are of interest to the user, and which files are members of those projects. The cache manager then uses a replication substrate such as Ficus to store copies of important files on the mobile machine so that they will be available at disconnection. All of this is done dynamically so that the portable computer will always have the files needed by the user.
Two papers concerning Seer have been published and are available over the net:
For more information on SEER, contact
Geoff Kuenning.