CS Events

PhD Defense

Toward Scalable and High-Performance I/O with Cross-layered Storage Design

 

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Tuesday, November 28, 2023, 12:00pm - 02:00pm

 

Speaker: Yujie Ren

Location : CoRE 301

Committee

Professor Sudarsun Kannan (Rutgers), Committee Chair

Professor Ulrich Kremer (Rutgers)

Professor Santosh Nagarakatte (Rutgers)

Professor Thu Nguyen (Rutgers)

Professor Sanidhya Kashyap (EPFL)

Professor Yuanchao Xu (UC Santa Cruz)

Event Type: PhD Defense

Abstract: Storage technologies have been evolving rapidly in the past decades with the advancement of new features and capabilities such as byte-addressability and near-hardware computational capability. However, software innovations to manage storage hardware advancement lag behind such progress. State-of-the-art approaches in OS or user-level either suffer from high I/O overheads (e.g., system calls, data movement, I/O scalability bottlenecks) or fail to manage storage devices to maximize the utilization of their capabilities. This dissertation addresses these problems with a cross-layered system design by dividing the I/O software stack into user space, OS kernel, and storage firmware to capitalize on the advantages of each layer. At a single storage level, to reduce software overheads in the traditional I/O stack in operating systems with emerging computational storage devices, our first work proposed and designed a cross-layered file system that disaggregates file systems into user space, OS, and storage devices to eliminate I/O scalability bottlenecks and scale I/O performance with fine-grained concurrency. To accelerate I/O and data processing, our second work proposed and implemented a novel CISC I/O interface compatible with POSIX, which packs multiple I/O operations with related computational tasks in a single compound I/O operation to utilize the compute power in storage devices and reduce data copy overheads effectively. Scoping beyond a single storage, the third part of this dissertation presents a novel solution to exploit the collective hardware and software capabilities offered by multiple storage devices by delegating resource management to user space and retaining important properties such as permission enforcement and sharing in the OS kernel. As a tangible outcome, through fundamental, principled, and end-to-end redesign of I/O stack, the works implemented in this thesis showcased the advantages of a cross-layered design by accelerating production-level applications significantly.

Contact  Prof. Sudarsun Kannan (Rutgers), Committee Chair