Location and Hours:

Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 1:50pm-2:40pm @ room 912B, Richardson Building

Instructor:

Prof. Anxiao (Andrew) Jiang, 427B Bright Building. Email: ajiang@cse.tamu.edu

Office hours: 4:00pm--5:00pm Friday

Students

Course Description:

Data storage is a very fast developing area in computer systems. With the wide adoption of flash memories, storage systems are undergoing a fundamental transition from magnetic-based mass storage to flash-based mass storage. Frontiers in storage systems – including new infrastructures of storage systems/networks, file systems and coding theories – are actively explored by both industry and academia. This course introduces the basic principles underlying storage systems and their state-of-the-art developments. Students are expected to get a comprehensive understanding of the numerous research directions, and explore novel ideas.

Course Materials:

Handouts in class.

Grading and Requirements:

Grading is based on homework (30%), presentation of papers in class (30%), and a final  project (40%). There  are no exams.

Homework:

1. Homework assignment one: Sort the papers in the reading list based on your preference for presentations, and email the sorted list to me by 11:59pm, Tuesday, September 8.

2. Homework assignment two: Sort the papers in the reading list based on your preference for presentations, and email the sorted list to me by 11:59pm, Friday, October 23.

Paper Presentation Requirements:

For a paper, a student first gives a five-minute mini presentation. Your goal is to help the audience understand the paper within five minutes. Questions will be asked after the mini presentation. Then, the student gives a 30-minute detailed presentation, which will again be followed by questions from the audience. Your goal is to help the audience have a detailed and clear understanding of the paper.

Slides are required for both the mini presentation and the detailed presentation. Email me the slides one day before the presentation.

Project:

(1) Choose to write either a research paper or a review paper.

• In a research paper, the student will identify a topic of interest, have a novel idea, and explore it. The paper should be at least 5 pages long. The focus is on creativity and rigor.
• In a review paper, the student will identify a topic of interest, and review existing work on this topic. The paper should cover at least eight significant papers on this topic, and be at least 10 pages long.

(2)  Students should send me (via email) a brief description of the project by November 20, 2009. The final paper is due (by email) on December 7, 2009.

Syllabus:
 

Date	Lectures	Reading
08/31/2009 Monday	Overview.	1. Wiki page on flash memory 2. Flash Memory Cells -- An Overview 3. Algorithms and Data Structures for Flash Memories
09/02/2009 Wednesday	Introduction to Flash Memories [Slides]
09/04/2009 Friday	Introduction to Flash Memories [Slides]
09/07/2009 Monday	Coding Theories for Flash Memories [Slides]	4. Storage Coding for Wear Leveling in Flash Memories
09/09/2009 Wednesday	Data movement.
09/11/2009 Friday	Data movement.
09/14/2009 Monday	Presentation by Ioannis Papadopoulos: David Woodhouse, JFFS: The journaling flash file system, Ottawa Linux Symposium, July 2001. [Short_ppt] [Short_pdf] [Detailed_ppt] [Detailed_pdf]
09/16/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Mohammad Chaudhry: Hui Dai, Michael Neufeld and Richard Han, ELF: An Efficient Log-structured Flash File System for Micro Sensor Nodes, in Proc. 2nd International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 176-187, 2004. [Short_pdf] [Detailed_pdf]
09/18/2009 Friday	Presentation by Shoeb Mohammed: Jen-Wei Hsieh, Tei-Wei Kuo and Li-Pin Chang, Efficient identification of hot data for flash memory storage systems. In ACM Transactions on Storage, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 22-40, 2006.  [Short_pdf] [Detailed_pdf]
09/21/2009 Monday	Presentation by Harshvardhan: Song Lin, Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti, Vana Kalogeraki, Dimitrios Gunopulos and Walid A. Najjar. Efficient indexing data structures for flash-based sensor devices. In ACM Transactions on Storage, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 468-503, Nov. 2006.  [Short_Detailed_pdf]
09/23/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Androniki Pazarloglou: Gaurav Mathur, Peter Desnoyers, Deepak Ganesan and Prashant Shenoy. Ultra-low power data storage for sensor networks. In Proc. the 5th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Nashville, Tennessee, April 2006.  [Short_Detailed_ppt] [Short_Detailed_pdf]
10/05/2009 Monday	Presentation by Cheng Cao: Andrew Birrell, Michael Isard, Chuck Thacker and Ted Wobber. A design for high-performance flash disks. In Operating Systems Review, 41(2), April 2007, pages 88-93.  [Short_Detailed_ppt] [Short_Detailed_pdf]
10/07/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Vivekanand Kothapalli: Suman Nath and Aman Kansal, FlashDB: Dynamic self-tuning database for NAND flash, in Proc. 6th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pp. 410-419, 2007.  [Short_Detailed_pdf]
10/09/2009 Friday	Presentation by Zakia Asad: Andreas Lachenmann, Pedro Jose Marron, Matthias Gauger, Daniel Minder, Olga Saukh and Kurt Rothermel. Removing the memory limitations of sensor networks with flash-based virtual memory. In Proc. EuroSys'07, Lisboa, Portugal, March 2007.  [Short_Detailed_pdf]
10/12/2009 Monday	Presentation by Sheng Qiu: Yuan-Hao Chang, Jen-Wei Hsieh and Tei-Wei Kuo, Endurance enhancement of flash-memory storage systems: An efficient static wear leveling design, Proc. DAC 2007, pp.212--217, San Diege, CA, June 2007.   [Short_Detailed_pdf]
10/14/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Chong Qiu: Hyojun Kim and Seongjun Ahn, BPLRU: A buffer management scheme for improving random writes in flash storage, FAST'08.  [Short_ppt] [Short_pdf] [Detailed_ppt] [Detailed_pdf]
10/16/2009 Friday	Presentation by Shivananda Reddy: David Roberts, Taeho Kgil, Trevor Mudge, Integrating NAND flash devices onto servers, in Communications of the ACM, vol. 52 , no. 4, pp. 98-106, 2009.     [Short_Detailed_ppt] [Short_Detailed_pdf]
10/19/2009 Monday	Presentation by Sivaguru Chendamaraikannan: Feng Chen, David A. Koufaty, and Xiaodong Zhang, Understanding intrinsic characteristics and system implications of flash memory based solid state drives, in Proceedings of the eleventh international joint conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems (SIGMETRICS/Performance), Seattle, WA, pp. 181-192, June 2009.  [Short_Detailed.ppt]  [Short_Detailed.pdf]
10/21/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Hongtao Qin: Sang-Won Lee and Bongki Moon, Design of Flash-based DBMS: An In-page Logging Approach, Proc. of ACM SIGMOD 2007.  [Short_Detailed.ppt] [Short_Detailed.pdf]
10/23/2009 Friday	Rewriting codes for flash memories.  [Slides]
10/26/2009 Monday	Memory hierarchy and disk storage.  [Slides]
10/28/2009 Wednesday	Constrained coding for magnetic/optical storage technologies.  [Chapter 1 of "An Introduction to Coding for Constrained Systems" by Brian H. Marcus, Ron. M. Roth and Paul H. Siegel]
10/30/2009 Friday	Constrained coding for magnetic/optical storage technologies.
11/02/2009 Monday	Emerging memory technologies. [Slides]
11/04/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Shoeb Mohammed: D. Patterson, G. Gibson, and R. Katz, A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), University of California Berkley, 1988.  [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/06/2009 Friday	Presentation by Sivaguru Chendamaraikannan: D. Andersen et al., FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes, in Proc. SOSP, 2009.   [Short_Detailed.ppt] [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/09/2009 Monday	Presentation by Vivekanand Kothapalli:  G. Gibson and R. Meter, Network attached storage architecture, in Communications of the ACM, 2000.  [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/11/2009 Wednesday	Attend the CSE distinguished speaker lecture, "Computing the entropy of two-dimensional shifts of finite type" by Brian Marcus, 4:10pm, Room 124 Bright Building.
11/13/2009 Friday	Presentation by Mohammad Chaudhry: R. Telikepalli, T. Drwiega, and J. Yan, Storage Area Network Extension Solutions and Their Performance Assessment, in IEEE Communications Magazine, 2004.   [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/16/2009 Monday	Presentation by Hongtao Qin: M. Armbrust et al., Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, Technical Report, U.C. Berkeley, 2009.  [Short_Detailed.ppt] [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/18/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Androniki Pazarloglou:  A. Singh, M. Korupolu, and D. Mohapatra, Server-storage virtualization: integration and load balancing in data centers, in Proc. ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, 2008.  [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/20/2009 Friday	Presentation by Chong Qiu: A. Chervenak, V. Vellanki, and Z. Kurmas, Protecting File Systems: A Survey of Backup Techniques, Proc. Joint NASA and IEEE Mass Storage Conference, 1998.  [Short.ppt] [Detailed.ppt]
11/23/2009 Monday	Presentation by Harshvardhan: F. Chang et al., Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2008.  [Short_Detailed.pdf]
11/25/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Shivananda Reddy:  U. Manber, Finding Similar Files in a Large File System, Technical Report, University of Arizona, 1993.
11/27/2009 Friday	Thanksgiving holiday, no class.
11/30/2009 Monday	Presentation by Sheng Qiu:  B. Zhu, K. Li and H. Patterson, Avoiding the Disk Bottleneck in the Data Domain Deduplication File System, in Proc. 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2008.
12/02/2009 Wednesday	Presentation by Cheng Cao: J. Ousterhout et al., The Case for RAMClouds: Scalable High-Performance Storage Entirely in DRAM, Proc. SOSP, 2009.
12/04/2009 Friday	Presentation by Zakia Asad:  G. Burr et al., Overview of Candidate Device Technologies for Storage-Class Memory, in IBM Journal of Research and Development, 2008.
12/07/2009 Monday	Presentation by Ioannis Papadopoulos:  (13) S. Raoux et al., Phase-Change Random Access Memory: A Scalable Technology, in IBM Journal of Research and Development, 2008.