DATE: Thursday, April 13, 2006
TIME: 10:30 a.m. – 11:300 a.m. - NOTE SPECIAL TIME
PLACE: Intel Seminar (CIC Suite 410)
INTEL EVENTS PAGE: http://www.intel-research.net/pittsburgh/events.htm

SPEAKER:
Florentina Popovici
University of Wisconsin-Madison

TITLE:
Data Driven Models in Storage System Design

ABSTRACT:
As storage components become more complex and powerful, it becomes increasingly challenging to take full advantage of their potential. Because of ease of composition and development, these systems are built in layers that have little or no information about the others. For good performance, decisions taken at one layer need to have knowledge of the behavior of other layers. In order to achieve this, we propose the use of data driven empirical models. For example, a disk scheduler at the kernel level should have an explicit model of the disk, and thus, the information it needs in order to decide how to order I/O requests.

We have built such models for disks and RAIDs and used them in the context of I/O request scheduling. The models are constructed such that they are efficient to access, need no configuration, and are portable across a wide range of devices. With simulations and experiments conducted under Linux, we show how our empirically-driven disk scheduler noticeably outperforms standard algorithms such as C-LOOK, and achieves the same level of performance as more complex rotationally-aware schedulers.

BIO:
Florentina Popovici is a doctoral student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is advised by Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. She is interested in operating systems, with a focus on storage systems. She is one of the holders of the Datamation world sort record.

For Further Seminar Info:
Contact Kim Kaan, 412-605-1203, or visit http://www.intel-research.net.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/