Experiences with IFS: A distributed image filing system

We have designed and implemented a distributed image filing system. Users sitting at workstations can scan, store and retrieve images stored on optical disk at an image server. The system is built as a set of client and server processes performing specialized tasks. The system is network independent, in the sense that it runs on any of the local networks currently available on the market, and location transparent, as any mapping between processes and machines is allowed, including the extreme case of a standalone system where all processes run on the same machine. We believe the system is interesting from the perspective of designing a network independent distributed system, and also from a software engineering point of view, as its modular design permitted simpler development, debugging and testing, as well as future extensibility.