ABSTRACT

Solid-state storage devices such as flash and phase-change memory have dramatically different properties than disks, yet are exposed in many systems as a generic block device. In this talk, I will present two systems that update the interface to such devices to better match their capabilities with their intended use. First, we investigated use of solid-state flash drives (SSDs) as a cache in front of slower disks. We find that there are numerous differences between the interface offered by the device, a persistent block store, and the service it provides, caching data. I will describe a new flash-caching system called FlashTier that redresses these differences through new block-addressing and space-management techniques. I will then discuss our work on storage devices that support direct access by applications. New storage-class memory (SCM) technologies, such as phase-change memory, promise user-level access to non-volatile storage through regular memory instructions. We built Mnemosyne, a simple interface for programming with persistent memory that addresses two challenges: how to create and manage such memory, and how to ensure consistency in the presence of failures.

BIOGRAPHY

Mike Swift is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research focuses on the hardware/operating system boundary, including devices drivers, new processor/memory technologies, and transactional memory. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts and received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1992. After college, he worked at Microsoft in the Windows group, where he implemented authentication and access control functionality in Windows Cairo, Windows NT, and Windows 2000. He received a Ph.D. on operating system reliability from the University of Washington in 2006.