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)
• Scaling blockchain (Soujanya Ponnapalli)
• Designing efficient storage for blockchain (Soujanya Ponnapalli and Aashaka Shah)
• Improving performance of persistent-memory applications and file systems (Rohan Kadekodi and Sekwon Lee)

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.

If you are a student considering grad school or applying for grad school, these links may be useful (advice on contacting profs, getting letters of recommendation, etc.)

I maintain the SOSP/OSDI Hall of Fame. This page indicates who has published the most at these premier venues, and who has been publishing recently. These are good guides for grad students trying to decide which professor to work with!

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

Students

• Jayashree Mohan (PhD)
  
• Soujanya Ponnapalli (PhD)
  
• Rohan Kadekodi (Masters)
  
• Aashaka Shah (PhD)
  
• Sekwon Lee (PhD)
  

Post-docs

• Supreeth Shastri (prev UMass Amherst)
  

Alumni

• Tianyu Cheng (Masters ➔ Apple)
  
• Pandian Raju (Masters ➔ Rubrik)
  
• Dhathri Purohith (Masters ➔ Nutanix)
  
• Ashlie Martinez (undergrad ➔ UWashington-Seattle)
  

Teaching

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
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. 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
  

Work in Progress

Recent Publications (All)

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   Code on Github   Extended Version (arXiv)   Blog post