CAREER: Towards Full-Stack Crash Consistency

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

Storage systems are an essential component of modern computers. The enormous data generated every day (e.g., financial transactions, scientific computations) make the robustness of all hardware and software layers in storage systems increasingly important. When facing unexpected crash events (e.g., power outage, operating system panic), a robust system must handle the crashes gracefully and maintain crash consistency, which is extremely difficult to achieve in practice due to the system complexity. This project takes a holistic view to analyze the crash consistency of diverse storage systems. It takes into account the hardware characteristics, the interactions between software layers (e.g., device drivers, file systems, key-value stores), and the lifecycle of system execution (e.g., normal execution paths and recovery code paths) to ensure the completeness, and leverages virtualization to minimize the disturbance for high fidelity. This project hopes to advance the robustness of storage systems that serve as a fundamental building block of modern society. For financial institutions where one minute downtime may lead to millions of dollars lost, such improved robustness is valuable; for scientific exploration where any piece of data may advance human knowledge, the benefit is immeasurable. The full-stack approach is expected to stimulate synergistic research in computer architecture, operating systems, databases, software engineering, disaster response, etc., and will benefit a wide range of practitioners including hardware manufacturers, software developers, and system administrators. Moreover, by collaborating with multiple experts in education and entrepreneurship, the project will spur curriculum development and industry collaboration, promote open source and reproducibility, and broaden participation. 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.