Workshop on Data Storage Research Vision

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds a focused workshop for bringing together a broad range of scientists, systems researchers, and information technology (IT) practitioners to discuss and establish a vision for the future of storage systems. The output of the workshop will be a public report documenting the discussions and a set of recommendations on future storage research directions. The workshop and the report should also stimulate effective research collaborations between the disparate research communities represented at the workshop. The big data revolution along with the dawn of the age of Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for novel and innovative storage systems to store, manage, retrieve, and efficiently utilize unprecedented volumes of data at increasingly faster speeds. There are a number of open challenges and research issues that need to be addressed both in the short and long term to ensure sustained storage systems efficacy and performance. In particular, the wide variety of applications of modern and emerging storage systems entail that the fundamental design of storage systems should be revisited. Existing standards and abstractions need to be reevaluated, and new sustainable data representations need to be designed to support emerging applications. New storage software designs are also necessary to take advantage of the hardware advancements such as persistent memories in order to maximize efficiency and performance. The workshop will identify the major issues of designing future storage systems and define a vision for storage research. Some of the broad set of directions to consider include, but are not limited to: 1) How to evolve storage systems to meet the challenges of scale, throughput, and sustainability arising from emerging applications such as deep learning and IoT? 2) How to address allocation, management, privacy, performance, and multi-tenancy to meet the demands of the intense migration of data from on-premise to cloud deployments? 3) How to design file system programming interfaces and higher-level yet simple-to-use interfaces for new storage systems? 4) How to design programming models to efficiently support innovative storage and deep storage hierarchies? 5) How to address pipeline issues and train the next generation of storage systems researchers? 6) How to design and make it easy for systems researchers to realize new applications and storage hardware? Workshop participants will be charged with assessing the current state and direction of research related to storage systems while making recommendations for research related to the current, short-term, and long-term needs of designing sustainable and scalable storage architectures. The workshop report, along with the list and biographies of the participants and the organizers, will be made available to the community via the workshop website. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.