Congratulations to Prof. Sudarsun Kannan, who has just received an NSF grant for his project titled "CNS Core:Small: File System Offloading," for an amount of $500,000, covering a three-year period starting 10/01/2019. He is the sole investigator on the project.
Computers use filesystems that facilitate applications to store and access data in a storage device. Filesystems reside inside a trusted Operating System (OS) and enable consistent, secure, and durable access to data. Applications run inside untrusted user space and must cross the trusted OS boundary for accessing storage hardware using filesystems. In this era of ultra-fast storage technologies such as flash and nonvolatile memory, crossing the OS boundary for input/output (I/O) access incurs high software overheads. The "Rutgers File System Offloading" project investigates the redesign of a high-performance filesystem that allows applications to access the storage hardware directly bypassing the OS while respecting crash-consistency, security, and durability.
The project would identify filesystem components responsible for crash-consistency, security, and durability and offload them into the storage hardware allowing applications to bypass the OS. The project would also explore the use of accelerators for offloaded components and redesign components to exploit storage hardware capabilities to improve data reliability. By introducing a fundamentally new model of storage software, the project aims to improve I/O performance for a wide domain of applications including Internet of Things (IoT) as well as personal, datacenter, and mission-critical systems. The project will also educate undergraduate and graduate on the benefits of reducing software overheads, understanding the hardware capabilities when designing software, and hardware-software codesign.
More details can be found on the National Science Foundation's webpage
