The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Storage-class memory (SCM) technologies such as phase-change memory, spin-transfer torque MRAM, and memristers promise the performance and flexibility of DRAM with the persistence of flash and disk. In this talk, I will discuss two interfaces to persistent data stored in SCM.

First, I will talk about Mnemosyne, which is a system that exposes storage-class memory directly to applications in the form of persistent regions. With only minor hardware changes, Mnemosyne supports consistent in-place updates to persistent data structures and performance up to 10x faster than current storage systems.

Second, I will talk about how to build file systems for storage-class memory. While standard storage devices rely on the operating system kernel for protected shared access, SCM can use virtual-memory hardware to protect access from user-mode programs. This enables application-specific customization of file system policies and interfaces. I will describe the design of the Aerie file system for SCM, which provides flexible high-performance access to files.

Bio:
Mike Swift is an associate 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 2005.