CAREER: Flashing Up Data Centers: An Orchestrated Design for Flash-based Distributed Storage Systems

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A large-scale deployment of flash devices into data centers can greatly improve the overall system performance and reduce the rapidly growing management cost (e.g., power, cooling, staffing, floor space). Despite the technical merits promised, such a grand technical transition fundamentally changes the long-held system design assumption for a disk-based storage and will inevitably bring major critical challenges in a real-world practice. For example, underutilization of flash space would cause huge economic loss; premature device wear-out may result in catastrophic data corruption; unbalanced system could bring severe resource contention; unoptimized applications may not receive anticipated benefits; and many others. This project aims to address these challenges. Research will be conducted to develop a cohesive design approach to providing an orchestrated whole-system optimization. By revisiting the entire storage hierarchy, from hardware, operating system, cluster middleware, to applications, the team will redesign the device architecture to enable an organic integration of flash devices as integral elements in a huge flash storage system, create a flash-based distributed storage service with optimized resource utilization and guaranteed data reliability. Furthermore, a set of key data center applications will be enhanced to fully exploit the great potential of the flash technology. As part of this CAREER project, the team will also seek influence to the industry, contribution to curriculum, and outreach to local area under represented students.