Abstract

Attached please find our submission to the ACM Transactions on Storage Systems. Our paper is titled “End-to-End Abstractions for Application-Aware Storage. ” In this article, we provide an overview of the problem of “information-gap ” in the storage stack, and present two novel abstractions that effectively bridge this gap, thereby enabling a range of functionality that is almost impossible to achieve with existing systems and interfaces. Most of the material in this article forms part of Gopalan Sivathanu’s Ph.D. dissertation. Our first abstraction is Type-Aware Storage that aims communicating pointer information to the disk hardware. We have published this abstraction in OSDI 2006. This article includes a new unpublished case-study of type-aware storage,“Disk-Level Data Consistency. ” This case-study proposes and evaluates how complex higher-level consistency properties can be achieved at the disk hardware-level, in a file-system–agnostic manner. Our second abstraction is Context-Aware I/O, a flexible mechanism to communicate between applications and data, across the storage stack. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the above abstraction, and demonstrate its usefulness through two separate case-studies. This abstraction and its case-studies have not been published in any other venue. Overall, of this 60 page article, about 60 percent is new unpublished material. This work was completely done when all authors were affiliated with the File systems and

Citations