I lead the UT Systems and Storage Lab. I am also a part of the LASR research group.

Research. My group aims to build the next generation of storage systems. This means building storage systems that have higher performance and stronger reliability. We build both storage systems and the tools need to develop such systems rigorously, such as testing frameworks. Our work involves innovation both at the data-structure level and at the systems level. We open-source all the software we build, and aim to have impact both inside academia and in industry.

Recent major projects:

• Crashmonkey and Ace. Tools to systematically test file-system crash consistency. OSDI 2018 Star
• PebblesDB. Write-optimized key-value store that outperforms LevelDB and RocksDB. SOSP 2017 Star

Current projects:

• Testing reliability of storage systems (Jayashree Mohan)
• Increasing blockchain throughput by eliminating storage bottlenecks (Soujanya Ponnapalli and Aashaka Shah)
• Improving performance of persistent-memory applications and file systems (Rohan Kadekodi and Sekwon Lee)
• Analyzing GDPR and building efficient GDPR-compliant systems (Supreeth Shastri)

Recent impact:

• Crashmonkey-generated tests have been added to xfstests, the file-system test suite for the Linux kernel (msg, patch)
• Crashmonkey found 10 long-standing bugs in btrfs and F2FS in the Linux kernel.
• Crashmonkey found a bug in the FSCQ verified file system which caused the file system to not persist data on fdatasync. The bug was in the unverified part of the file system (Haskell-C bindings).
• The techniques behind PebblesDB are being used in the storage product of a major IT company.

My research is supported by NSF, VMware, Facebook, and Google. I am an Affiliated Researcher at VMware Research.

Teaching

Spring 2018: Distributed Systems: CS 380D

Fall 2017: Virtualization: CS 378

Fall 2016: Graduate Operating Systems: CS 380L

Fall 2014: Back at Wisconsin: Introduction to Operating Systems (CS 537)

Service

2019: FAST, NSDI, ATC, SOSP, PLOS
2018: FAST, SYSTOR, ATC, OSDI
2017: ACM SRC (with SOSP), SOCC, MASCOTS, MSST, HotStorage, NVMW, WWW
2016: HotStorage, NVMW

External Reviewer/Review Committee Member for ASPLOS 18, ASPLOS 17, Eurosys 17
Reviewer for TOCS, TACO, TDSC, TOS

Co-chair of the Poster Session for OSDI 2018

NSF Panelist in 2018

News

Jul 2018: Our work on building transactional file systems using the file-system journal (TxFS) won one of the three Best Paper Awards at ATC 18!

May 2018: I was invited to the NSF Workshop on "Data Storage Research 2025"!

Mar 2018: I was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award to work on write-optimized infrastructure!

Feb 2018: Our work on Protocol-Aware Recovery was featured in the Morning Paper!

Feb 2018: Our work on protocol-aware recovery was awarded one of the best Best Paper Awards at FAST 2018!

Jan 2018: Awarded the NSF CAREER Award for project on building IO-efficient infrastructure!

Older News

Talks

Nov 2018. Gave a talk about systems research to Nipun Batra's undergraduate OS class at IIT Gandhinagar.

Nov 2018. Presented CrashMonkey at Microsoft Research, Redmond.

Jul 2018. Presented Merkelized LSM to HatchCrypto class.

Apr 2018. Presented PebblesDB at the Systems Seminar at the University of Washington.

Apr 2018. Presented PebblesDB at Microsoft Research, Redmond.

Older Talks

Awards

• Best Paper Award at ATC 2018
  
• Best Paper Award at FAST 2018
  
• NSF CAREER Award 2018
  
• Best Poster Award at ApSys 2017
  
• Best Paper Award at FAST 2017
  
• ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award 2016
  
• Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship 2014
  
• University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni Scholarship 2009
  

Awards won by members of research group

• Jayashree Mohan: Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2019
  
• Ashlie Martinez: CRA Best Undergraduate Researcher 2018
  
• Ashlie Martinez: UT Austin Dean's Honored Graduate 2018
  
• Ashlie Martinez: UT Austin Aspire Research Excellence Award 2018
  

Recent Publications (All)

Analyzing GDPR Compliance Through the Lens of Privacy Policy
Jayashree Mohan, Melissa Wasserman, Vijay Chidambaram
Poly 19 at VLDB 19
PDF   Bibtex

Analyzing the Impact of GDPR on Storage Systems
Aashaka Shah, Vinay Banakar, Supreeth Shastri, Melissa Wasserman, Vijay Chidambaram
HotStorage 19
PDF   Bibtex

The Seven Sins of Personal-Data Processing Systems under GDPR
Supreeth Shastri, Melissa Wasserman, Vijay Chidambaram
HotCloud 19
PDF   Bibtex

Finding Crash-Consistency Bugs with Bounded Black-Box Crash Testing
Jayashree Mohan, Ashlie Martinez, Soujanya Ponnapalli, Pandian Raju, Vijay Chidambaram
OSDI 18
PDF   Bibtex   Slides   Extended Version (arXiv)   Blog post   Star Fork