Optimizing Data Systems for Modern Storage and Memory Technology

Abstract: Data-intensive applications stress the memory hierarchy with unnecessary data movement and the need to integrate new storage technologies. My research addresses these challenges through two main approaches: unlocking the potential of modern storage devices via faithful modeling and minimizing data movement through hardware specialization. Solid-state drives (SSDs), now dominant in secondary storage, exhibit read/write asymmetry and access concurrency. Most storage-intensive applications overlook these characteristics, leading to suboptimal performance. I propose a new storage modeling approach capturing these properties. Using this model, I develop an asymmetry & concurrency-aware DBMS bufferpool management (that uses the device's write concurrency to amortize the asymmetric write cost) and a concurrency-aware graph manager (that uses the device's read concurrency) for efficient storage access. This paves the way for SSD-aware designs, allowing more systems and components to benefit from this approach.

Moving up the memory hierarchy, data movement is a key bottleneck exacerbated by static layout decisions. To address this, we leverage hardware specialization by developing a custom FPGA-based hardware through software/hardware co-design that performs on-the-fly data transformation closer to data. Overall, my research contributes to (i) the development of data systems components that are tailored for modern SSDs and (ii) building hardware/software co-design approaches that makes near-data processing more efficient, scalable, and robust.

Bio: Tarikul Islam Papon is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Boston University (BU), advised by Manos Athanassoulis. Currently, he also is serving as a graduate-level course instructor at BU. His research focuses on hardware-aware data management challenges, stemming from the evolution of storage and memory devices. During his PhD, he interned at Microsoft Research and Intel Labs. Before joining BU, Papon served as a Lecturer for four years at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. He obtained his master's and bachelor's from the same department. There he worked on medical informatics using various machine learning and embedded system techniques.

A pizza lunch for attendees will be available at 11:45 a.m. in Computer Science Building, Room 150/151.