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Research Interests

 Parallel and distributed systems, storage systems, real time systems, embedded systems, and performance evaluation

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Current Work

A large number of existing parallel storage systems consist of hybrid storage components, including solid-state drives (SSD), hard disks (HDD), and tapes. Compared with high-speed storage components (e.g. SSD and HDD), tapes inevitably become an I/O performance bottleneck. Prefetching and caching are commonly employed techniques to boost I/O performance by increasing the data hitting rate of high-end storage components. However, prefetching in the context of hybrid storage systems is technically challenging due to an interesting dilemma: aggressive prefetching schemes can efficiently reduce I/O latency, whereas overaggressive schemes may waste I/O bandwidth by transferring useless data from HDDs to SSDs or from tapes to HDDs. In this research project, we will investigate new data-mining-based multilayer prefetching techniques to improve performance of hybrid storage systems. The goals of this research are to (1) design data-mining algorithms for multilayer prefetching; (2) develop predictive parallel prefetching mechanism for SSD-based storage systems; (3) implement parallel data transfer among SSDs, HDDs, and tapes; (4) develop meta-data management schemes; and (5) implement a simulation framework named FastStor-SIM. The developed toolkit can be used to improve the I/O performance of data centers with hybrid storage systems.

            Power, Security, and Performance Issues in Storage Systems

Power, security, and performance evaluation of storage systems are of critical importance. This work is intended to develop new adaptive strategies that can judiciously select appropriate power states and security services for disk I/O requests while endeavoring to guarantee various performance requirements ( e.g., desired response times).  In what follows, the novel approaches to secure storage systems are described.

Previous Work

An Adaptive Write Strategy for Secure Local Disk Systems

.4 Protect stored data from being tampered or disclosed. Although an increasing number of secure storage systems have been developed, there is no way to dynamically choose security services to meet disk requests' flexible security requirements. Furthermore, existing security techniques for disk systems are not suitable to guarantee desired response times of disk requests. We remedy this situation by proposing an adaptive strategy (referred to as AWARDS) that can judiciously select the most appropriate security service for each write request while endeavoring to guarantee the desired response times of all disk requests. Experimental results show that AWARDS significantly improves security and overall performance over an existing scheme by up to 325.0% and 358.9% (with averages of 199.5% and 213%).

Quality of Security Control in Parallel and Distributed Disk Systems

Building networked and data intensive applications are highly scalable and can alleviate the problem of disk I/O bottleneck. Although a number of parallel and distributed disk systems have been developed, the systems lack a means to optimize quality of security for dynamically changing networked environments. We remedy this situation by proposing an adaptive quality of security control scheme for parallel and distributed disk systems that makes it possible for disk systems to adapt to changing security requirements and workload conditions. Our approach is carried out in three phases: dynamic data partitioning, response time estimation, and adaptive security quality control. Hence, our scheme is conducive to adaptively and expeditiously determining security schemes for disk requests in a way to improve security of parallel and distributed disk systems while making an effort to guarantee desired response times of the requests.