Many data services tune and change redundancy configurations of files over their lifetimes to address changes in data temperature and latency requirements. Unfortunately, changing redundancy configs (transcode) is IO-intensive. The Morph cluster file system introduces new transcode-efficient redundancy schemes to minimize overheads as files progress through lifetime phases. For newly ingested data, commonly stored via 3-way replication, Morph introduces a hybrid redundancy scheme that combines a replica with an erasure-coded (EC) stripe, reducing both ingest IO and capacity overheads while enabling free transcode to EC by deleting replicas. For subsequent transcodes to wider, more space-efficient EC configs, Morph exploits Convertible Codes, which minimize data read for EC transcode, and introduces new block placement policies to maximize their effectiveness.

Systems for training massive deep learning models (billions of parameters) today assume and require specialized "hyperclusters": hundreds or thousands of GPUs wired with specialized high-bandwidth interconnects such as NV-Link and Infiniband. Besides being expensive, such dependence on hyperclusters and custom high-speed inter-connects limits the size of such clusters, creating (a) scalability limits on job parallelism; (b) resource fragmentation across hyperclusters.