Events Calendar

Exploiting Collective Behavior in Datacenter Storage

CENG SeminarMithuna Thottethodi, Assistant Professor, Purdue UniversityMonday, April 12, 2010
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
(RTH -306)Hosted by Prof. Timothy M. PinkstonAbstract:
The storage layer is a significant factor in the capital cost, energy cost and performance of servers and data-centers. Emerging high-performance, low-energy, non-volatile, solid-state storage media show enormous promise to solve two of the three problems (storage performance and energy). However, the high cost-per-byte of solid-state media has hindered wide-spread adoption in servers.
SieveStore is a cost-effective, ensemble-level disk-cache architecture which enables the use of solid-state media to significantly filter access to storage ensembles via two key innovations. First, Sievestore leverages the typical collective behavior of storage ensembles which is quite distinct from the behavior of individual servers in the ensemble.
Second, we show that selective cache allocation – sieving – is fundamental to enable efficient ensemble-level disk-caching. We find that the two components (sieving and ensemble-level caching) each contribute to SieveStore's cost-effectiveness. SieveStore is effective in achieving significantly higher hit ratios than unsieved ensemble-level disk-caching (35%-50% more, on average) while using only 1/7th the number of SSD drives as unsieved, ensemble-level disk-caches.
Further, ensemble-level caching is a strictly superior cost-performance point compared to per-server caching.Biography:
Mithuna Thottethodi is an assistant professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His research interests include multicore memory hierarchies and interconnection networks, microarchitecture, datacenters and large storage systems, and programmable microfluidics. He was awarded the National Science Foundation's CAREER award in 2007. He received the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN Beta Chapter) Outstanding Professor award in Fall 2004 and the Ruth And Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher award in 2006. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Duke University.

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - -306

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Janice Thompson