b o s s p h o r u s

a simple volumetric datastore for dense 3D data

WARNING! Bossphorus is NOT stable and NOT tested. Use at your own risk, and always keep a backup copy of your data someplace safe.

bossDB Feature Parity

For more information, see our Features page.

Why use bossphorus?

bossphorus simplifies data-access patterns for data that do not fit into RAM. When you write a 100-gigabyte file, bossphorus automatically slices your dataset up to fit in bite-sized pieces.

When you request small pieces of your data for analysis, bossphorus intelligently serves only the parts you need, leaving the rest on disk.

Usage

You can either run bossphorus using Python on your host machine, or use the provided Dockerfile to run bossphorus in a Docker container.

Docker Method (Preferred)

1. Build the docker image

docker build -t bossphorus .

2. Create a directory for your filesystem to live in.

mkdir ./uploads

3. Source the provided alias file.

This exposes a simplified wrapper to run bossphorus in a container.

source alias

4. Run bossphorus!

bossphorus $(pwd)/uploads

You can run bossphorus in demo-mode by omitting the path to your uploads directory. Data saved to bossphorus using this method will be destroyed when you end the bossphorus process! Use only when testing bossphorus out.

Native Method

pipenv install
mkdir ./uploads
python3 ./run.py

pip Method

pip3 install -U bossphorus

Configuration

You can modify the top-level variables in bossphorus/config.py in order to change where bossphorus stores its data by default, and what size each file is by default.

A word of warning: While larger values of BLOCK_SIZE will reduce the amount of parallel threads in order to read a small file, it will also increase RAM usage per read. 256³ is probably a good default, unless you have a very good reason to change it.

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Why bossphorus instead of other volumetric services?

That's a great question! bossphorus is certainly not the most performant, nor is it the most secure. And it's not versioned or distributed. If you're looking for a volumetric datastore, I would recommend looking below at the Alternatives section for some really well-engineered systems.

The primary advantage of bossphorus is that it uses an identical API to that of bossDB — and so if you anticipate your data growing from a few gigabytes now to a few terabytes later, you can get used to the bossDB ecosystem (intern, ingest, and many more tools) now, and then invest in real bossDB architecture later on with a seamless transition.

Why is it called bossphorus?

bossphorus borrows its indexing pattern from bossDB, a cloud-native database that can store way more data than bossphorus ever could. If your day-to-day routine includes multiple terabytes of volumetric data, bossDB may be for you.

Alternatives

Project	Description	If you want...
bossDB	Petabyte-scale, Cloud-Native Volumetric Database	...faster IO speed and infinite scalability
DVID	Distributed, Versioned, Image-oriented Dataservice	...versioned data

Contributing

Updating the Documentation

When you make any changes to outward-facing APIs or services, you must update the documentation. To do so, run the following:

cd website/                                # enter the docusaurus dir
yarn                                       # install dependencies
GIT_USER=XXXX yarn run publish-gh-pages    # build and upload the documentation

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