A filesystem for next-generation flash disks

  • William Josephson | Princeton University

Flash memory has found wide application in military, aerospace, and consumer electronics. Although it offers superior read performance and shock insensitivity than conventional disk-based storage and has often been touted as being more energy efficient, it has traditionally not been suitable for high performance write-intensive applications. Recently, however, a number of manufacturers have introduced high performance solid state disks based on flash memory. These devices typically implement the salient features of existing filesystems designed for flash devices, including wear-leveling and log-structured, garbage collected storage management for improved write performance. I will describe work-in-progress at Princeton on a new filesystem, VsFS, that rather than duplicate these features, delegates many of the storage management functions to the underlying device driver and firmware stack which can in turn be tuned independently for a particular hardware platform. We have implemented a prototype for Linux 2.6 that compared to commonly available filesystems such as Ext3 achieves higher performance as measured in I/O transactions per second at lower cost as measured in percentage of host CPU cycles used. Furthermore, by decoupling storage management from the high-level filesystem interface, it simplifies the implementation and, we anticipate, will facilitate a richer interface, including user-level RDMA-like access to individual files.

This talk describes joint work with Kai Li at Princeton and David Flynn at FusionIO in Salt Lake City.

Speaker Details

William Josephson is currently a graduate student at Princeton University working with Kai Li on high-performance storage with an eye toward supporting high-dimensional data-mining applications. Prior to coming to Princeton, he worked on high-performance compression at Data Domain, a leader in deduplication storage now based in Santa Clara, CA. He has also worked with a number of other startups in finance and network security as well as interning at several research labs, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories, the Computer Science Research Center at Bell Labs, and on several occasions the Institute for Defense Analyses.”We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in living Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.”- Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

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