Seminar Speaker
Date Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 10:30 am, E1 034
Title: The Case for Cross-Layer Optimizations in Storage: A Workflow-Aware Storage System
Speaker: Matei Ripeanu
Abstract
This project explores the use of file system custom metadata as a bidirectional communication channel between applications and the storage system. This communication channel can be used to pass hints that enable cross-layer optimizations that are hindered by the ossified file-system interface. We study this approach in context of storage system support for large-scale workflow execution systems: Our workflow optimized storage system, exploits application hints to provide per-file optimized operations, and exposes data location to enable location aware scheduling.
This project argues that an incremental adoption path for adopting cross-layer optimizations in storage systems exists, it presents the system architecture and the integration steps, and evaluates the proposed approach using synthetic as well as real applications workload at large scale. Our prototype demonstrates the viability of the cross-layer optimization approach. Further, our evaluation using synthetic benchmarks and real many task applications shows that our approach brings tangible performance gains.
Biography
Matei Ripeanu is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of British Columbia.