Virtual Filesystem for Molecular Dynamics Dataset Metadata in Apache Airavata

This project builds a FUSE-based virtual filesystem in Rust that exposes molecular dynamics dataset metadata as a POSIX-compatible interface for scientific workflows on HPC environments. Starting with the ATLAS dataset (1,900+ proteins), the filesystem mounts dataset metadata as a browsable directory tree where each protein entry is a directory containing its metadata as JSON files, accessible through standard filesystem operations (ls, cat, find). The architecture uses pluggable data source abstractions so additional molecular dynamics databases (mdCATH, MemProtMD) can be unified behind the same filesystem API with per-source connectors. An existing Python indexing layer crawls and normalizes heterogeneous source formats (TSV, HDF5, REST APIs) into a uniform POSIX tree structure that the Rust FUSE daemon serves. Performance is benchmarked against direct API access for metadata retrieval latency.