BetrFS: A Right-Optimized Write-Optimized File System

  • Rob Johnson | Stony Brook University

This talk will describe BetrFS, a file system built on Bepsilon-trees, a Write-Optimized Data Structure (WODS). BetrFS outperforms widely-used file systems, such as ext4 and xfs, on many benchmarks, sometimes by orders of magnitude. A recent paper on BetrFS was the runner-up for best paper at USENIX FAST 2015.

The talk will cover – Write-optimized data structures, such as LSM-trees and Bepsilon-trees – Comparison of WODS for file system applications – How to design a file system around the performance strengths of WODS – Ongoing work to make BetrFS “dominate” all other file systems

Speaker Details

Rob Johnson is a Research Professor at Stony Brook University and conducts research on Security, Big Data Algorithms, and Cryptography. He is director of the Security, Programming Languages, And Theory (SPLAT) lab at Stony Brook, the Cryptography Lab at the New York Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT), and the Smart Grid Cyber-Security Testing Lab of the New York Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC).

He does theoretical work with an impact on the real world. He developed BetrFS, a file system that uses recent advances in data structures to improve performance on some operations by over an order of magnitude. He invented the Quotient filter, a high-performance alternative to the Bloom filter for Big Data applications. He founded cache-adaptive analysis, a theoretical framework for designing and analyzing algorithms that dynamically share memory with other processes. He broke the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) crypto-system used in almost all DVD players and TVs. He co-authored CQual, a static analysis tool that has found dozens of bugs in the Linux kernel. Since then, it has been used to audit the entire Debian Linux distribution for format-string bugs.

He completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2006.

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks