Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Abstract : Storage Class Memory (SCM) is the term used to describe a new class of memory technology that is both nonvolatile and byte addressable. Several SCM technologies are under active development currently. Among them, phase change memory (PCM) is considered to be the most promising one. PCM has access speed 2x to 5x slower than DRAM, but PCM price is expected to be much cheaper than DRAM. Systems with SCM are projected to be available commercially in 2012/2013 timeframe. I/O has traditionally been one of the bottlenecks (if not the key bottleneck) in many systems and applications. System designers and application developers have spent significant effort in tuning and optimizing software to hide or avoid I/O access overhead. With SCM (since it is nonvolatile), I/O operations could be reduced drastically or eliminated completely. A key question for system and software designers is what is the best way to exploit SCM in the next generation (or next release) of software systems? In this talk, I will discuss our work in this area. I will first discuss the current SCM technology and its implications on software system architectures. I will then present the design of an SCM-based logging and recovery system. Our experiment, using SolidDB, showed that SCM-based logging can improve throughput by as much as 7 times over disk-based logging in TATP benchmark. Finally, I will briefly discuss some other research opportunities in this space. Biosketch: Dr. Hui-I Hsiao is a Program Director at IBM Almaden Research Center where he is responsible for technology innovation for emerging market. Prior to this, he was the Chief Scientist of Information Management and Deputy Director of IBM China Research Lab in Beijing from 2006 to 2008. Dr. Hsiao is a recipient of 2008 ACM Software System Award, which recognizes individual(s) for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and in commercial acceptance. Dr. Hsiao joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1990 and was appointed the manager of the Parallel Databases department in 1995. At IBM Watson Research, he led the design and development of DB2 Parallel Edition - a highly scalable parallel database system on open system platform. He moved to IBM Almaden Research Center in 1997 and managed the Content Management System department from 2000 to 2006. In that capacity, he led his group designed and developed an extensible architecture and a new data model for content management systems, which later became the foundation of the IBM Content Manager V8.1 product. Dr. Hsiao received an Outstanding Innovation award and an Outstanding Technical Achievement award for contributions to IBM DB2 and IBM Content Manager technologies. He was invited to IBM corporate technical recognition event (CTRE) in 2005, which recognizes top technical contributors in IBM. He has published more than 30 refereed research papers and granted more than 25 patents. He was the program committee chair for 2006 AP SSME Symposium and also served on program committees for many international conferences. Prior to joining IBM, he was a software engineer at Nicolet Instrument Corporation at Madison Wisconsin, where he was named a Nicolet Associate Fellow. Dr. Hsiao received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin at Madison