When: Tuesday, April 24, 3:00 p.m.

Where: 3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Garth Gibson, Associate Professor of Computer Science

Special Seminar

Abstract:
Late 90s research on Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD), done by CMU's Parallel Data Lab (PDL), has set the agenda for large scale parallel storage systems of today. At its core the NASD architecture storage offers is a collection of variable length objects whose representation is encapsulated behind an object attributes abstraction and an asynchronous keyed hash authorization mechanism, rather than the traditional undifferentiated ordered set of 512-byte data containers. NASD has directly influenced large scale storage systems such as the Google File System, Lustre Cluster File Systems, Panasas Parallel Object Storage Clusters, ANSI's latest storage commandset (SCSI Object Storage Devices, OSD), DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems and the IETF's emerging next generation Parallel NFS (NFSv4.1). Of course, as we were finishing the funding for this research at CMU, even with PDL's excellent industry relationships, we couldn't give it away to anyone. NASD's architectural change was too broad for the industry to figure out how to adopt quickly. So a handful of CMU researchers started Panasas Inc. to compete the NASD architecture into today's large scale storage systems. Panasas' solution is a bladeserver distributed system scaling to over 500 storage servers in Los Alamos' soon-to- break 1 PetaFLOPS Roadrunner supercomputer. With other customer sites connecting over 10,000 compute servers to one Panasas parallel storage cluster, NASD @ Panasas has experienced the challenges of extreme scale. In this talk I will explain the mechanisms NASD and Panasas have developed to cope with scale, notably a new interpretation of RAID for the era of terabyte magnetic disks, and how this experience has reshaped and renewed my information systems research agenda.

Garth Gibson is an associate professor of CSD and ECE, co-founder and CTO of Panasas Inc, lead PI of the DOE-funded SciDAC Petascale Data Storage Institute, acting chair of the steering committee for USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, and chair of the selection committee of the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage technical field award. Host: Jeannette Wing

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