Upcoming Talk: Carlos Maltzahn of UCSC on Skyhook Blueprint for Computational Storage, a Case for Amplifying Research Impact via Open Source

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We will be hosting a research and practice colloquium talk on “Skyhook Blueprint for Computational Storage” for the computer science department. The talk is free and open to the public.

  • by: Prof. Dr. Carlos Maltzahn, UC Santa Cruz
  • about: Skyhook Blueprint for Computational Storage
  • on: June 13th, 2022, 16:15-17:45 Uhr
  • on: Zoom (and in the Vorstandszimmer)
  • as part of the departmental Informatics Colloquium series

Abstract: Computational storage has the promise of reducing power consumption and latency of datacenter services and is motivated by the trend of disaggregating traditional computer systems into components so that compute and storage can scale independently. This disaggregation places greater demand on expensive top-of-rack networking resources since compute and storage nodes end up in different racks and even rows as the installation is growing. More network traffic also uses up more energy-hungry and latency-inducing CPU cycles for sending and receiving data. Somewhat paradoxically, this effect of disaggregation amplifies the benefit of moving some compute back into storage, undoing some of the disaggregation.

The Skyhook Data Management project is embedding data processing functionality into storage using a novel design pattern that can be applied on the distributed storage systems level as well as on the storage device level. The design pattern embeds software into the storage layer that extends the set of commands, a storage system or device can perform. The crucial difference to other computational storage designs is that these commands are implemented by the quickly evolving Apache Arrow open source data access ecosystem. The design pattern insures that the storage layer and the embedded implementations can evolve independently.

In this talk I will give an overview of Skyhook DM and how open source strategies have shaped this research project and increased its impact. I will briefly give an overview of our efforts to encourage others to apply these strategies with programs pioneered at the Center for Research in Open Source Software and now the Alfred P. Sloan-funded Open Source Program Office at UC Santa Cruz.

Speaker: Dr. Carlos Maltzahn is the founder and director of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Maltzahn also co-founded the Systems Research Lab, known for its cutting-edge work on programmable storage systems, big data storage & processing, scalable data management, distributed system performance management, and practical reproducible evaluation of computer systems. Carlos joined UC Santa Cruz in 2004, after five years at Netapp working on network-intermediaries and storage systems. In 2005 he co-founded and became a key mentor on Sage Weil’s Ceph project. In 2008 Carlos became a member of the computer science faculty at UC Santa Cruz and has graduated nine Ph.D. students since. Carlos graduated with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Dipl. Inf. from the University of Passau.