Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University

Garth Gibson

Professor – CS, ECE ; Affiliated Faculty – DSSC

Department	Electrical and Computer Engineering
Office	9111 Gates-Hillman Center
Telephone	(412)-268-5890
Email	garth@cs.cmu.edu
Website	http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~garth/

Research Interests

Professor Gibson's research spans computer systems, computer architecture, and performance evaluation while focusing on memory system hierarchies that include cache, memory, secondary storage, file systems, and networks. He leads the Parallel Data Laboratory in its projects on parallel, distributed, prefetching, and video file systems, and scalable, available storage subsystems.

The labs current principle research project, Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD), is about decoupling control and data paths to enable direct manipulation of storage devices by client applications.

The NASD project comprehensively restructures storage architecture by: promoting devices to first-class network clients equipped with streamlined transfer protocols; exploiting at the device increasingly cost-effective computational power to offload device-specific optimizations; restructuring the layering in file and storage systems to enable offloading to devices and clients, and to support diverse high-level file-system functionalities; and increasing the quality of the workload information available at devices to improve self-management decisions and device-specific optimizations.

NASD drives employ cryptography for capability-based security; an object-based interface to offload storage layout and prefetching; drive-scheduled timed accesses for scalable video service; and a remote execution interface for offloading application- specific processing closer to data.