The Application/Storage Interface: After All These Years, We're Still Doing It Wrong

Despite years of experience, countless implementations, and increased importance in the modern era, many basic facets of storage systems remain problematic. In this talk, I'll highlight two fundamental problems found at the interface between applications and storage, and suggest new directions that help bridge the gap between what applications need and what current storage systems provide.

Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau is a professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and his wife Andrea co-lead a research group that has been active in the systems community for many years; their work has had academic impact (including nine Best Paper awards) and practical impact (including the transaction checksum in Linux ext4 and fast file system checking in FreeBSD). Remzi co-chaired USENIX ATC '04, FAST '07, OSDI '10, and will co-chair SOCC '14. Remzi has won numerous teaching awards and is co-author (with his wife) of a free online operating systems book (available at http://www.ostep.org); chapters of the book have been downloaded over 1 million times in the past few years.