Garth Goodson
Alumnus, Ph.D.
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
gg2k@ece.cmu.edu

I now work at Network Appliance in the Advanced Development Group under the direction of the CTO, Steve Kleiman.

Contact Information Email:  gg2k at ece.cmu.edu
Email:  goodson at netapp.com

Resume: [pdf] [html] [txt]

Research Advisor: Gregory Ganger

Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, August 2004
M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, May 2000
B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, May 1998

I'm an alumnus of the Parallel Data Laboratory at CMU, which is involved in a number of storage system related projects. I have completed my Ph.D. thesis in providing efficient and flexible consistency for highly fault-tolerant, decentralized storage systems (as part of the PASIS project). I previously worked on a project called Self-Securing Storage Systems (or S4 for short). I also have interests in high-performance file systems, networks, and operating systems.

In both the Spring of 2001 and 2002 I was a teaching assistant for 18-546: Introduction to Storage Systems.
Thesis Description Fault-tolerant storage systems spread data redundantly across a set of storage-nodes in an effort to preserve and provide access to data despite failures. One difficulty created by this architecture is the need for a consistent view, across storage-nodes, of the most recent update. Such consistency is made difficult by concurrent updates from distinct clients, partial updates made by clients that fail, and failures of storage-nodes. Although protocols exist for achieving such consistency, they generally fall short in a number of areas including efficiency, scalability, and flexibility.

My thesis demonstrated how to achieve scalable, highly fault-tolerant storage systems by leveraging an efficient and flexible family of strong consistency protocols enabled by server versioning. In particular, the design of block-based storage systems and file systems are evaluated. Furthermore, the tradeoffs involved in supporting file system semantics, above the consistency protocol, were be explored.

Publications

  • Lazy verification in fault-tolerant distributed storage systems
    Michael Abd-El-Malek, Gregory R. Ganger, Garth R. Goodson, Michael K. Reiter, Jay J. Wylie. 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), October 26 -- 28, 2005.

  • Fault-scalable Byzantine fault-tolerant services
    Michael Abd-El-Malek, Gregory R. Ganger, Garth R. Goodson, Michael K. Reiter, Jay J. Wylie. Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), October 23 -- 26, 2005.

  • Efficient Byzantine-tolerant erasure-coded storage
    Garth R. Goodson, Jay J. Wylie, Gregory R. Ganger, Michael K. Reiter. To appear in the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, June 28 -- July 01 2004.

  • Efficient Byzantine-tolerant erasure-coded storage -- Extended version of DSN submission
    Garth R. Goodson, Jay J. Wylie, Gregory R. Ganger, Michael K. Reiter. Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-03-104, December 2003.

  • A protocol family for versatile survivable storage infrastructures
    Garth R. Goodson, Jay J. Wylie, Gregory R. Ganger, Michael K. Reiter. Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-03-103, December 2003.

  • Storage-based intrusion detection: watching storage activity for suspicious behavior
    Adam G. Pennington, John D. Strunk, John Linwood Griffin, Craig A. N. Soules, Garth R. Goodson, Gregory R. Ganger. USENIX Security (Washington, DC, 06--08 August 2003), USENIX Association, 2003.

  • Metadata efficiency in a comprehensive versioning file system
    Craig A. N. Soules, Garth R. Goodson, John D. Strunk, and Gregory R. Ganger. Conference on File and Storage Technologies (San Francisco, CA, 31 March-02 April 2003), pages 43-57. USENIX Association, 2003.

  • Decentralized storage consistency via versioning servers
    Garth Goodson, Jay Wylie, Greg Ganger & Mike Reiter. Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-CS-02-180, September 2002.

  • Intrusion detection, diagnosis, and recovery with self-securing storage
    John D. Strunk, Garth R. Goodson, Adam G. Pennington, Craig A.N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger. CMU SCS Technical Report CMU-CS-02-140, May 2002.

  • Survivable storage systems
    G. Ganger, P. Khosla, M. Bakkaloglu, M. Bigrigg, G. Goodson, S. Oguz, V. Pandurangan, C. Soules, J. Strunk, J. Wylie. DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition (Anaheim, CA, 12-14 June 2001), pages 184-195 vol 2. IEEE, 2001.

  • Self securing storage: Protecting data in compromised systems
    J. Strunk, G. Goodson, M. Scheinholtz, C. Soules, G. Ganger. 4th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, October 2000.

  • I/O infrastucture support for network-attached storage devices
    G. Goodson. Masters thesis. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University, May 2000.

  • Network support for network-attached storage
    D. Nagle, G. Ganger, J. Butler, G. Goodson, C. Sabol. Hot-Interconnects, August 1999.

  • Optimizing the NASD RPC layer: An application-level networking approach
    G. Goodson. First CMU Student Symposium on Computer Systems, January 1999.
    • Interests For fun, during the warmer months of the year, a group of us used to gather for a weekly pickup game of ultimate frisbee.  We usually play on Sundays on Flagstaff Hill (across from Phipps Conservatory). During the summer I played in the Pittsburgh Summer League.

    I also enjoyed mountain biking in Frick Park, and the outdoors in general.

    More recently I have taken up salsa dancing. Even more recently I have taken lessons with Lisa King; she is very good.

    I have also been dabbling in some digital photography. Click here for some photos.

    I now live in Fremont, CA and have taken up remote control planes. See here for more information than you could ever want on the hobby: RC Groups.

    Last updated on July, 2005.