• Speaker: Eno Thereska (Microsoft Research Cambridge)
  • Date: June 15th, 2012 (Friday)
  • Room: CIT 368
  • Title: "Similarities and differences of a data center and a personal storage system"
  • Abstract:
This talk will describe two storage systems we've build over the last 4 years. The first is designed for 100K+ machines in data centers. A primary design goal here is power-proportionality and high performance. The system automatically turns on and off thousands of machines at a time to match system load with available resources. The second storage system is designed for end-user devices (e.g., smartphone, tablet, cloud). It caters to spontaneous and ad hoc user accesses and requires minimal management effort from users. A primary design goal is was usability and delighting users. At first glance, these two storage systems seem very different. However, they share several technical building blocks, including a distributed log abstraction, strong consistency mechanisms for data and metadata and power control mechanisms.

Eno received his PhD (ECE, 2007), Masters (ECE, 2003) and Bachelor (ECE + CS + Math minor, 2002) degrees all from Carnegie Mellon. He’s been a Researcher with Microsoft Research since 2007. He has broad interests in systems but also enjoys venturing into other areas occasionally, like machine learning and HCI.