1st Programmable File Systems Workshop (PFSW’14)

in conjunction with
The 23rd International ACM Symposium on High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2014)
Vancouver, BC, Canada on June 23-27, 2014 (workshop is one day TBD)

http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/~carlosm/PFSW/

WORKSHOP ABSTRACT
A major milestone in the evolution of digital computers was the development of
the stored-program concept and the design of Turing-complete machines as
opposed to fixed-program computers. Yet, we still treat an increasingly
important subsystem of computers largely as a fixed-program computer: file and
storage systems. Among the key reasons for this history is the justified fear
that (1) any interface changes in file and storage systems will make legacy
data inaccessible and locks the data to a particular system and (2)
programmability will increase the probability of data loss.

Yet with the advent of open source file systems a new usage pattern emerges:
users isolate subsystems of these file systems and put them in contexts not
foreseen by original designers. Examples are: (1) an object-based storage back
end gets a new RESTful front end to become a Amazon Web Service's S3 compliant
key value store, (2) a data placement function is used as a placement function
for customer accounts, and (3) the HDF5 scientific data access library is
embedded into parallel storage systems. This trend shows a desire for the
ability to use existing file system services and compose them to implement new
services — a desire, however, that is frequently stumped by the difficulty of
bringing new services of advanced functionality up to production quality and
sufficiently low probability of data loss. At the same time government and
industry are heavily investing into the development of new, extremely
scalable, and highly efficient, distributed I/O stacks that largely abandon
traditional file and storage system interfaces.

Designing programmability into file and storage systems has the following
benefits: (1) we are achieving greater separation of storage performance
engineering from storage reliability engineering, making it possible to
optimize storage systems in a wide variety of ways without risking years of
investments into code hardening; (2) we are creating an environment that
encourages people to create a new stack of storage systems abstractions, both
domain-specific and across domains, including sophisticated optimizers that
rely on machine learning techniques; (3) we are informing commercial parallel
file system vendors on the design of low-level APIs for their products so that
they match the versatility of open source storage systems without having to
release their entire code into open source; and (4) we are using this
historical opportunity to leverage the tension between the versatility of open
source storage systems and the reliability of proprietary systems to lead the
community of storage system designers.

GOAL
This one-day workshop focusses on frameworks that allow the programmability of
file and storage systems while addressing the risks of data interface change.
The workshop aims to serve as a venue for leaders in the file system and
storage community to exchange ideas outside the tradition of half a century of
classic file and storage systems research which focussed on a small set of
unchanging interfaces.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit papers with unpublished, original work of not
more than 8 pages of double column text using single-spaced 10 point size on
8.5 x 11 inch pages (including all text, figures, references, and appendices),
as per ACM 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines (document templates can be found at
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Electronic
submissions in pdf format are received at
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pfsw2014 at the submission
deadline.

TOPICS
Addressing programmability of the non-volatile part of the memory hierarchy,
the workshop seeks contributions on relevant topics, included but not limited
to:

- Programming models
- Data interface change management and isolation
- Interface metadata management and propagation
- Compile-time and runtime storage optimization
- Data and task placement in large-scale storage stack
- Local and distributed performance management and isolation
- Nonstop storage system evolution

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission of papers: March 21, 2014, 11:59 PM PST
Author notification: April 15, 2014
Final versions: May 13, 2014
Workshop: One day during June 23-27, 2014

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Carlos Maltzahn - University of California, Santa Cruz
Patrick McCormick - Los Alamos National Laboratory

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
John Bent, EMC
Andre Brinkmann, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Randal Burns, Johns Hopkins University
Phil Carns, Argonne National Laboratory
Yong Chen, Texas Tech University
Toni Cortes, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Evan Felix, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Maya Gokhale, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Gary Grider, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Dean Hildebrand, IBM Almaden
Dries Kimpe, Argonne National Laboratory
Scott Klasky, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Quincey Koziol, HDF Group
Jay Lofstead, Sandia National Laboratory
Barney Maccabe, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Carlos Maltzahn, University of California at Santa Cruz
Adam Manzanares, HGST
Pat McCormick, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Michael Mesnier, Intel
Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy, Amazon.com
Neoklis Polyzotis, University of California at Santa Cruz
Rob Ross, Argonne National Laboratory
Sage Weil, Inktank Storage
Brent Welch, Google
Jon Woodring, Los Alamos National Laboratory