Computer Science Department, University of Crete
HY-590.45. Modern Topics in Scalable Storage Systems

info | readings | syllabus | other resources

Course Staff

Name Email Office Hours
Instructor: Kostas Magoutis hy590-45@csd By appt./H-311
Teaching Assistant: Fallia Kourou hy590-45@csd By appt.

General Information

The course meets on Mon, Wed 6-8pm in H.208. There will be occasional makeup classes, whose dates will be announced in advance. See schedule for exact dates.

Announcements

13.2.2022 10:00: To join the hy590.45 mailing list, send an e-mail to majordomo@csd with body subscribe hy590-45-list

7.2.2022 10:00: The course will start on Monday 14/2

1.1.2022 10:00: You are welcome to get in touch with the instructor to discuss course-related issues

Course Description

The explosive growth of information processing services in recent years has created an unprecedented need for storage capacity. Scalable access to storage resources requires a class of distributed systems designed for fast, reliable, and uninterrupted access to storage media (e.g., magnetic disks and tapes) over high-speed networks. This course offers an introduction to scalable storage systems and examines existing design techniques as well as current research problems in the design and implementation of such systems, along with possible solutions.

Some of the advantages of the scalable storage model over direct-attached storage include expandable capacity and performance, as well as improved utilization and sharing of distributed storage resources. A number of challenges, however, are facing the scalable storage systems architect: First, it is the higher complexity (compared to direct-attached storage) due to the distributed nature of the scalable storage system. Administration, capacity planning, configuration, backup, and disaster recovery are complicated in large-scale scalable storage systems. Second, transferring data over the network requires stronger security and safety guarantees than when transferring them on the system I/O bus. In addition, it sometimes requires new, storage-specific network transport protocols. These and other challenges make scalable storage an exciting research area that has made significant advances in recent years.

The core part of the course focuses on the study of scalable storage systems with special emphasis on architectures, design principles for scalable performance, reliability, and availability, the management of data during their lifecycle, application-specific design concepts, ways to reduce implementation cost, storage system capacity planning, and storage outsourcing services.

This course is targeted for graduate students and advanced undergraduates and requires the undertaking of a research project. The topics of the research projects will be chosen with the help and guidance of the course staff.

Coursework

Prerequisites

Grading

The final grade depends on class participation, an in-class quizz, a research project, and a final exam.

Readings

 There are a number of paper readings that are available online. You are expected to read the papers before the beginning of each class.

There is no required textbook for this class. The following textbooks, however, are recommended readings:

Syllabus

Date Topic Readings, notes
Mon 14/2 Course overview -
Wed 16/2 Background See recommended readings
Mon 21/2 Extending file systems over the network Sandberg: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem
Wed 23/2 NFS (contd.) Macklem: Not Quite NFS, Soft Cache Consistency for NFS
Mon 28/2 Distributed coordination Ongaro: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm
Wed 2/3 Raft (contd.) Proposals for papers (presentations 1-3) due
Mon 7/3 Clean Monday, no class -
Wed 9/3 Distributed virtual disks Lee: Petal: Distributed Virtual Disks
Mon 14/3 Petal (contd.) Proposals for project topics due
Wed 17/3 Distributed file systems I Thekkath: Frangipani: A Scalable Distributed File System
Mon 21/3 Distributed file systems II Ghemawat: The Google File System
Wed 23/3 Google file system (contd.) -
Mon 28/3 Related work presentations I Paper link
Wed 30/3 No class -
Mon 4/4 No class -
Wed 6/4 No class -
Mon 11/4 Related work presentations I Paper link
Wed 13/4 Related work presentations I Paper link
Mon 18/4 - Fri 29/4 Easter recess -
Mon 2/5 Labor day, no class -
Wed 4/5 Related work presentations II Paper link
Mon 9/5 Related work presentations II Paper link
Wed 11/5 Related work presentations II Paper link
Mon 16/5 Application-specific storage systems Saito: Manageability, Availability and Performance in Porcupine: A Highly Scalable, Cluster-based Mail Service
Wed 18/5 Related work presentations III Paper link
Mon 23/5 Related work presentations III Paper link
Wed 25/5 Related work presentations III Paper link
TBA Distributed transactions Corbett: Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database
TBA Project presentations -

Projects HOWTO

Please note the following project guidelines:

Other Resources / Useful links