Abstract: As storage capacity of disks experience unprecedented growth, latent sector errors have become the main obstacle to ensuring data integrity and improving storage reliability. In this talk, I will first discuss how such errors affect modern High-Performance Computing Centers and reduce their serviceability. I will describe a decentralized data offloading approach for mitigating the impact of center storage failures, using peer-to-peer collaborative sites. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the latest trends in circumventing latent storage system errors, and present the concept of energy-cost of storage reliability.

Short Bio: Ali R. Butt is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. Ali received the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2006. His research interests are in experimental computer systems, especially in file and storage systems. Currently, his focus is on I/O and storage issues of modern High Performance Computing systems and data-intensive computing. Ali is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award (2008) and IBM Faculty Award (2008).