DSG Seminar Series • Data-Intensive Systems in the Microsecond Era

Speaker: Pınar Tözün, IT University of Copenhagen (Talk virtually over zoom)

Abstract: 

Late 2000s and early 2010s have seen the rise of data-intensive systems optimized for in-memory execution. Today, it has been increasingly clear that just optimizing for main memory is neither economically viable nor strictly necessary for high performance. Modern SSDs, such as Z-NAND and Optane, can access data at a latency of around 10 microseconds. As a result, there has been a wide range of work that design data structures that can take advantage of both main memory and modern SSDs. In parallel, there are efforts to transform the software stack for IOs for better efficiency.

In this talk, I will be going over the landscape of modern SSDs and storage stack focusing on the challenges and opportunities that await data-intensive systems when it comes to exploiting them.

Bio: Pınar Tözün is an Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen. Before ITU, she was a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center. Prior to joining IBM, she received her PhD from EPFL. Her thesis received ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention in 2016. Her research focuses on performance characterization of data-intensive workloads, scalability and efficiency of data-intensive systems on modern processors and storage, and resource-aware machine learning.

Talk video

Talk slides