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CSG389 Spring 2005 Course Schedule

Last updated: March 30, 2005

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This schedule will be adjusted during the course of the semester based on the availability of guest speakers. The topics and content of lectures with an asterix are not finalized and likely to change.

Lecture	Date	Topic
1	1/5	Introduction and Overview of Storage System and Metrics of I/O Quality Introduction to the course material. Metrics for evaluating storage from reliability, security, and performance aspects. Cooperman

2	1/12	Disk Drive Architecture and Operation Basics of how disk drives work from the low-level magnetics to the data layout and defect management. Readings Ruemmler and Wilkes. An introduction to disk drive modeling. 1994. Ganger's PhD Thesis -- Apendix B Pages 5-10 through 5-20 of Quantum FireballCR disk drive manual. Schindler

3	1/19	Disk Request Optimization and Storage Device Abstractions Ideas behind disk request scheduling, device drivers and operating systems. Readings Anderson, Dykes, and Riedel. More than an interface - SCSI vs. ATA. Proc. of FAST Conference, 2003. Selzter,Chen, and Osterhout. Disk scheduling revisited, 1990. Worthington, Ganger, and Patt. Scheduling Algorithms for Modern Disk Drives. Proc. of ACM SIGMETRICS, 1994. Chapters 7 and 8.1-8.2 from Design and Implementation of BSD 4.4. Assignments Homework 1 (PDF), due 1/26/2005 at the begining of the class. Project 1 (PDF). Written report due 2/2/2005 at the begining of the class. Project package (tar-ball). Schindler

4	1/26	Lecture cancelled - university closed due to inclement weather.

5	2/2	File System Data Structures, Caching and Metadata Consistency Basic operation of file systems and on-disk data placement algorithms for local file systems. Caching and Metada Consistency Readings Ganger, McKusick, Soules, and Patt. Soft Updates: A Solution to the Metadata Update Problem in File Systems. 2000. Chapters 6 and 8.3 from Design and Implementation of BSD 4.4. Chapter 8 from UNIX Internals (U. Vahalia). Schindler

6	2/9	Scale and Performance in Local File Systems A survey of techniques for achieving better performance from file systems. Readings Sweeney. Scalability in the XFS File System. 1996. Rosenblum and Osterhout. Design and Implementation of a Log-structured File System.1991. ( alternate download source) Optional Readings Seltzer, Smith, Balakrishnan, Chang, McMains, Padmanabhan. File System Logging Versus Clustering: A Performance Comparison. Proc. of Winter USENIX Conference, 1995. Seltzer, Ganger, McKusick, Smith, Soules, and Stein. Journaling versus Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data Protection in File Systems. 2000. Assignments Homework 1.5 (PDF), due 2/9/2005 at the begining of the class. Cooperman Connecting Storage to the Rest of the System Design and technology of storage interconnects, host adapters, and protocols. Jim Espy, EMC

7	2/16	Special Topic: Optimizing File System Performance Readings Schindler, Griffin, Lumb, and Ganger.Track-aligned Extents: Matching Access Patterns to Disk Drive Characteristics, Proc. of FAST Conference, 2002. Schindler Networked Storage Interconnects This lecture covers recent trends of merging storage and local/wide area networking into a single infrastructure. Readings Chapters 4 and 5 from iSCSI: The Universal Storage Connection (J. Hufferd). Book on reserve at Snell Library. Optional: For background and more information you can also read Chapters 1, 7, 8, and 12. Assignments Homework 2 (PDF), due 2/23/2005 at the begining of the class. Solutions to homework 1 (PDF). Slides from David Black's lecture (PDF). David Black, EMC

8	2/23	Midterm Examination In preparation for the exam read all the materials and review your lecture materials. The exam is closed-books. Sample exam (PDF) and solutions (PDF). RAID: Towards higher data protection and performance Basic concepts of RAIDs (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). RAID levels and striping. Readings Chen, Lee, Gibson, Katz, and Patterson. RAID: High-performance, reliable secondary storage, ACM Computing Surveys, 26(4), 1994. Cooperman

	3/2	Spring Break (no classes)

9	3/9	Introduction to Performance and Modeling of Storage Arrays More on RAID performance and introduction to performance modeling. storage. Assignments Solutions to homework 2 (PDF). Schindler

10	3/16	Basic Performance Analysis Introduction to queueing theory, operational laws and performance bounds analysis. Assignments Lecture notes (PDF). Schindler Introduction to Distributed File Systems Readings Howard et al., Scale and performance in a distributed file system. ACM TOCS 6(1), 1988. (restricted access - from NEU only) Satyanarayanan. The Evolution of Coda, ACM TOCS 20(2), 2001. Sections 10.1-10.8 and 10.14-10.17 from UNIX Internals (U. Vahalia). Cooperman

11	3/23	Architecture and Performance of High-End Storage Disk Arrays Assignments Homework 3 (PDF), due 3/30/2005 at the begining of the class. Additional Readings The following reference was kindly provided by Peter Lauterbach and includes materials highly relevant to the lecture topic. N. Gunther. Benchmarking Blunders and Things That Go Bump in the Night. Invited presentation at the Workshop on Software Performance Reliability, Menlo Park, CA, Apr 15-17 2004 Peter Lauterbach, EMC

12	3/30	More on Distributed File Systems Readings Please (re)read the materials assigned for the lecture on 3/16. Cooperman Network Attached Storage NAS blurs the difference between logical volume, storage device, and file system. Readings Hitz, Lau, and Malcom. File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance, Proc. of Winter USENIX Conference, 1994. Gibson and Van Meter. Network Attached Storage Architecture, Communications of the ACM , 2000. (restricted access - from NEU only). Optional Readings Lustre: A Scalable High-Performance File System. (home page at www.lustre.org) Schindler

13	4/6	Access Control, Backups, and Data Protection We will discuss the basics of tape backup and the challanges in backup data management. Schindler Readings Please (re)read File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance that was assigned for the lecture on 3/23/2005. Chervenak, Vellanki, and Kurmas.Protecting File Systems: A Survey of Backup Techniques, Mass Storage Conference, 1998. Optional Readings Patterson, Manley, Federwisch, Hitz, Kleiman, Owara. SnapMirror: File System Based Asynchronous Mirroring for Disaster Recovery, Proc. of FAST Conference, 2002. Assignments Homework 4 (PDF), due 4/6/2005 at the begining of the class. Solutions to homework 3 (PDF).

14 (*)	4/13	Special Topic: Object-based Storage How do name and location services work in a flat object name space with no hierarchical directory structure. Schindler Readings EMC Corporation. EMC Centera: Content Addressed Storage. 2003. Quinlan and Dorwand.Venti: a new approach to archival storage, Proc. of FAST Conference, 2002.

	4/20	Final Examination Same place and time as lecture

An EMC on-site visit will be scheduled during the semester. This visit will include a tour of the assembly facility in Franklin, MA, where high-end disk arrays are assembled and tested for hardware failures. Other possibility is a visit to the interoperability lab and the customer response center to see how problems are tracked and resolved.

Last updated: 3/30/2005