CAREER: Power and Performance Optimal Distributed Transactions

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is working to advance the state of the art in the design of storage systems for large-scale websites like Facebook, Uber, and Google that are an integral part of our lives. The project aims to benefit society by making such websites faster, easier to program, and less expensive to build. It will produce research papers that guide industrial efforts and future researchers. It will also produce and release working prototypes of new storage designs that industrial practitioners and other researchers can build off of or compare against. The project will advance discovery and broaden participation by involving undergraduates from the University of Southern California and institutions that serve under-represented groups in research experiences, training graduate students, developing curriculum that integrates teaching and research, and by conducting outreach to K-12 students at schools that serve under-represented groups. The goal of this project is to understand the fundamental tradeoffs between power and performance. The scope of power properties includes consistency models and transactions. The scope of performance properties includes latency, throughput, and their combination. To understand what is not possible we will formulate, conjecture, and attempt to prove impossibility results. To demonstrate what is possible we will design new systems that touch the boundary of our impossibility results. We will implement our designs and publish the implementations publicly. We will evaluate our implementation at large scale to validate they provide the claimed properties and to quantify their benefits and overheads.