Abstract: The increasing complexity in storage software and hardware brings new challenges to achieve predictable performance and efficiency. On the one hand, emerging hardware break long-held system design principles and are held back by aged and inflexible system interfaces and usage models, requiring radical rethinking on the software stack to leverage new hardware capabilities for optimal performance. On the other hand, the computing landscape is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and complex, demanding explicit systems-level support to manage hardware-associated complexity and idiosyncrasy, which is unfortunately still largely missing.

 

In this talk, I will discuss my efforts to build low-latency and cost-efficient datacenter storage systems. By revisiting existing storage interface/abstraction designs and software/hardware responsibility divisions, I will present holistic storage stack designs from single servers to cloud datacenters, which deliver orders of magnitude of latency improvement and significantly improved cost-efficiency.

Short Bio: Huaicheng is a postdoc at CMU in the Parallel Data Lab (PDL). He received his Ph.D. from University of Chicago. His interests are mainly in Operating Systems and Storage Systems, with a focus on building high-performance and cost-efficient storage infrastructure for datacenters. His research has been recognized by two best paper nominations at FAST (2017 and 2018) and has also made real impact, with systems in production deployment, code integration to Linux, and a storage research platform widely used by the research community.