18-746/15-746 Lectures and Readings (Spring 2008)

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.

April 16th (L19): 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)

April 14th (L18): Storage access control

• Same readings as L17.

April 9th (L17): Distributed storage security

• 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)

April 7th(L16): Virtualization

• Recommended optional reading: 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)

April 5th: Guest lecture by Milo Polte

• Read the project 3 description.

March 31st: Guest lecture by Marc Unangst

• GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters. Frank Schmuck and Roger Haskin. Appears in FAST, January 2002. (pdf)
• Scalable performance of the Panasas Parallel File System. Brent Welch, Marc Unangst, et al. Appears in FAST, February 2008. (pdf)

March 26th (L15): NAS interfaces (a.k.a. DFS II)

• Same readings as L14.
• Recommended optional reading: 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)

March 24th (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)

March 19th (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) (same as L12)

March 17th (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)

March 3rd (L11): Storage networking

• No reading.

February 25th (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)

February 20th (L9): Database storage management

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

February 18th (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)

February 13th (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)

February 6th (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)

February 4th (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)

January 30th (L4): Disk drive firmware

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

January 23rd and 28th (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)

January 16th (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)

January 14th (L1): Introduction and overview of storage systems