Seltzer, MargoMurphy, Nicholas2011-09-212009Seltzer, Margot and Nicholas Murphy. 2009. Hierarchical file systems are dead. In Proceedings of the 12th conference on Hot topics in operating systems (HotOS'09). Berkeley, CA: USENIX Association.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:5136361For over forty years, we have assumed hierarchical file system namespaces. These namespaces were a rudimentary attempt at simple organization. As users have begun to interact with increasing amounts of data and are increasingly demanding search capability, such a simple hierarchical model has outlasted its usefulness. For this reason, we should design file systems whose organizations map to the ways we access and manipulate data now. We present a new file system architecture in which we replace the hierarchical namespace with a tagged, search-based one.en-USConference Paper2011-09-21