Seminars

PDL CONSORTIUM SPEAKER SERIES

A ONE-AFTERNOON SERIES OF SPECIAL SDI TALKS BY
PDL CONSORTIUM VISITORS

DATE: Monday, May 12, 2014
TIME: 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
PLACE: CIC 2101


SPEAKERS:
2:00 - 2:45 pm Michael Kozuch, Intel
2:45 - 3:30 pm Roger MacNicol, Oracle
3:30 - 4:00 pm break
4:00 pm Sorin Faibish, EMC


SPEAKER: Michael Kozuch, Intel
System Software for Persistent Memory
[SLIDES - PDF]
Michael Kozuch will serve as proxy for Intel co-workers Subramanya R Dulloor, Sanjay Kumar, Anil Keshavamurthy, Philip Lantz, Dheeraj Reddy, Rajesh Sankaran, and Jeff Jackson in presenting their (best paper award winning) Eurosys'14 paper entitled, "System Software for Persistent Memory." The abstract, for which, follows:

Emerging byte-addressable, non-volatile memory technologies offer performance within an order of magnitude of DRAM, prompting their inclusion in the processor memory subsystem. However, such load/store accessible Persistent Memory (PM) has implications on system design, both hardware and software. In this paper, we explore system software support to enable low-overhead PM access by new and legacy applications. To this end, we implement PMFS, a light-weight POSIX file system that exploits PM's byte-addressability to avoid overheads of block-oriented storage and enable direct PM access by applications (with memory-mapped I/O). PMFS exploits the processor's paging and memory ordering features for optimizations such as fine-grained logging (for consistency) and transparent large page support (for faster memory-mapped I/O). To provide strong consistency guarantees, PMFS requires only a simple hardware primitive that provides software enforceable guarantees of durability and ordering of stores to PM. Finally, PMFS uses the processor's existing features to protect PM from stray writes, thereby improving reliability.

Using a hardware emulator, we evaluate PMFS's performance with several workloads over a range of PM performance characteristics. PMFS shows significant (up to an order of magnitude) gains over traditional file systems (such as ext4) on a RAMDISK-like PM block device, demonstrating the benefits of optimizing system software for PM.

BIO: Michael (Mike) Kozuch is a Principal Engineer for Intel Corporation and adjunct faculty member in the ECE department at Carnegie Mellon University whose interests include computer architecture and system software. Mike received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Penn State University in 1992, a M.A. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1994, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1997.


SPEAKER: Roger MacNicol, Oracle
Columnar Processing in Oracle: pivots and fractured mirrors
[SLIDES - PDF]
Starting with a brief history of columnar databases, Roger MacNicol will be walking us through Oracle’s high-level design choices in Hybrid Columnar and Pure Columnar database and some of the tradeoffs involved in RDBMS design. The talk will include showing the genesis of two of the key ideas in academic research.

BIO:

  • MA, D.Phil (Oxon)
  • 4GL on Pick OS
  • uniVerse multi-dimensional DB
  • Architect for Sybase IQ: first commercially successful columnar database
    • Chair TPC-H
  • Oracle HA/DR
  • Oracle Data Storage Technology
    • Table Scan Driver
    • Exadata Offload Server
    • Hybrid Columnar Compression

SPEAKER: Sorin Faibish, EMC
New IO and memory architectures for next generation applications
[SLIDES - PDF]
This talk will discuss challenges being addressed by EMC as it seeks to bring new storage solutions for high-performance computing. Specifically, it will discuss new advances in parallel file systems, including POSIX interface changes and caching and write buffering schemes (e.g., burst buffers, IO-forwarding key-value stores, and flash memory hierarchies) for improving their efficiency. In addition to describing our ongoing efforts, I will highlight opportunities for research that could have a big impact.

BIO: Sorin Faibish is an EMC Distinguished Engineer and the liaison to CMU PDL for 8 years. Sorin's main work is in architecture design of NFS and storage clusters, grid computing, architect of performance strategy of EMC storage and file systems. Sorin is a technology consultant and evanghelist of pNFS as well as member of ietf, SNIA and SpecSFS committees and direct contributor to the NFSv4 and pNFS protocols. Sorin has over 60 papers and 47 granted patents and member of IEEE ACM, USENIX and SMPTE and focused lately on High Performance Computing.

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SDI / ISTC SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/