The file system interface provided by today's operating systems has not kept up with available hardware. Consequently, the applications do not take full performance advantage of the current capabilities. This project will explore new software and hardware architectures to improve the storage interface with the potential to provide a uniform, secure and performant interface across a range of storage mechanisms. ? To achieve these goals, the project will explore novel kernel- and user-space mechanisms to access storage systems ranging from local persistent memory to remote key-value stores. Further, research thrust will examine means of providing the flexibility of these two storage classes in bus-attached devices such as solid state drives, which are mostly limited to a fixed-size block storage interface. New mechanisms will be evaluated via software implementation in a research operating system and full-system simulation of proposed hardware features. ? The rapid adoption of cloud models such as serverless computing has resulted in a wide range of applications which are free of the backwards-compatibility constraints, creating opportunities for novel research in this area to benefit cloud computing systems, which may result in technology transfer. Further, the project will involve and mentor students at the undergraduate, masters, and PhD levels, and in particular will seek to involve masters degree students from a departmental program that actively recruits from under-represented groups.
Software developed as part of this project will be made available under an open-source license. When possible, traces collected during this work will be submitted to the trace repository at http://iotta.snia.org. A project website (http://khoury.northeastern.edu/~pjd/nonblock) will be used to make available artifacts, code, and data resulting from this project, including containerized versions of key simulations for reproducibility. The website will be maintained beyond the duration of the project.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
