18-746 Lectures and Readings (Fall 2006)

For some class meetings, readings will be assigned. Usually, these readings will consist of relevant technical papers, articles or instructor-prepared notes. Paper copies of assigned readings and notes will be provided in class and online. However, please note that online versions of the readings are only available when accessed from a 128.2.* (CMU) IP address.

The readings listed should be read BEFORE class on the assigned day.

November 20th (L20): Capacity planning

• Attribute-managed storage (Richard Golding, Elizabeth Shriver, Tim Sullivan, and John Wilkes, 1995)
• 15-849a (Fall 1999) Lecture 2: Queueing Theory Terminology (Mor Harchol-Balter, 1998)
• 15-849a (Fall 1999) Lecture 4: Operational Laws and Modification Analysis (Mor Harchol-Balter, 1998)

November 16th (L18): Storage access control

• A framework for evaluating storage system security. Erik Riedel, Mahesh Kallahalla, and Ram Swaminathan. Appears in the Proceesings of the First Usenix Conference of File and Storage Technologies (FAST'02). (pdf)

November 14th (L17): Backups and disaster recovery

• Designing for disasters. Kimberly Keeton, Cipriano Santos, Dirk Beyer, Jeffrey Chase, John Wilkes. Appears in the Proceesings of the Third Usenix Conference of File and Storage Technologies (FAST'04). (pdf)

November 9th(L16): Virtualization

• Serverless Network File Systems (xFS). Thomas E. Anderson, Michael D. Dahlin, Jeanna M. Neefe, David A. Patterson, Drew S. Roselli, Randolph Y. Wang. Appears in the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 14, No. 1. February 1996. (pdf)

November 7th (L15): NAS interfaces

• Network Attached Storage Architecture. Garth A. Gibson and Rodney Van Meter. Appears in the Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 11, November 2000. (pdf)

October 31st (L14): Distributed file systems

• The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System (Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman, 1996)
• Chapter 9 (The Network Filesystem) (pdf)
• Recommended optional reading:
  • Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System. John H. Howard, Michael L. Kazar, Sherri G. Menees, David A. Nichols, M. Satyanarayanan, Robert N. Sidebotham, Michael J. West. Appears in the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 6, No. 1, Pages 51-81. February 1988. (pdf)
• Optional reading:
  • Optional reading: "NFS Version 3 Protocol Specification" (RFC 1813: B. Callaghan, B. Pawlowski, P. Staubach, June 1995) (txt)

October 26th (L13): Disk array systems

• RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage (Peter M. Chen, Edward K. Lee, Garth A. Gibson, Randy H. Katz, and David A. Patterson, 1994)

October 24th (L12): Disk array organization

• RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage (Peter M. Chen, Edward K. Lee, Garth A. Gibson, Randy H. Katz, and David A. Patterson, 1994)(pdf)

October 19th (L11): Storage networking

• The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management (John William Toigo, 1999)
• Chapter 6 (The Advent of SANs)(pdf)

October 17th (L10): Storage protocols, controllers, and device drivers

• The SCSI Bus & IDE Interface: Protocols, Applications & Programming, 2nd ed. (Friedhelm Schmidt, 1999)
• Chapter 11 (SCSI Architecture) (pdf)

Oct 3d (L9): Database storage management

• Fundamentals of Database Systems (Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe, 1994)
  • Chapter 4 (Record storage and primary file organizations) (pdf)

September 28th (L8): Caching and FS integrity

• Soft Updates: A Solution to the Metadata Update Problem. Gregory R. Ganger, Markall Kirk McKusick, Craig A.N. Soules, Yale N. Patt. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. May 2000. (pdf)
• Practical File System Design with the Be File System (Dominic Giampaolo, 1999)
• Chapter 7 (Journaling) (pdf)

September 26st (L7): On-disk data layout

• The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System (Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman, 1996)
• Chapter 8 (Local filestores) (pdf)
• Embedded Inodes and Explicit Grouping: Exploiting Disk Bandwidth for Small Files. Gregory R. Ganger and M. Frans Kaashoek. Appears in the Proceedings of the Usenix Technical Conference. January, 1997. (pdf) (ps)

September 21th (L6): File system organization

• Practical File System Design with the Be File System. Dominic Giampaolo. 1999.
• Chapter 2 (What is a file system?) (pdf)
• UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers. Uresh Vahalia. 1996.
• Chapter 8 (File system interface and framework) (pdf)

September 14th (L5): Disk request optimization

• Scheduling Algorithms for Modern Disk Drives. Bruce L. Worthington, Gregory R. Ganger, and Yale N. Patt. Appears in the Proceedings of the ACM Sigmetrics Conference. May, 1994. (ps)

September 7th (L4): Disk drive firmware

• An Introduction to Disk Drive Modeling. Chris Ruemmler and John Wilkes, 1994. (pdf)

September 5th (L3): Disk drive operation

• Digital Large System Mass Storage Handbook. Paul Massiglia. 1986.
• Chapter 2 (Magnetic disk technologies): read pages 2-1 to 2-20 (pdf) and 2-38 to 2-52 (pdf).
• Chapter 12 (System considerations): read pages 12-1 to 12-11. (pdf)
• Probability Refresher. Mor Harchol-Balter. 2000. (pdf)

August 31st (L2): Metrics of I/O system quality

• Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd ed. John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson. 2002. (pdf)
• Section 7.7: "I/O performance measures"
• Section 7.8: "A Little queuing theory"
• Section 7.9: "Benchmarks of storage performance and availability"
• MTBF Description, Kevin Dally. 1995. (txt)

August 29th (L1): Introduction and overview of storage systems