New storage technologies and their impact on file system design

New persistent memory technologies like phase-change memory or magnetoresistive RAM are blurring the boundaries between memory and storage. Their performance is similar to conventional DRAM, while they are non-volatile and their costs might become close to the costs of SSDs. Designing file systems for persistent memory will pose a number of challenges to the software stack, as the latencies of read and write requests to them are in the same order as the latency of a system call. It is therefore important to reduce the storage software stack to its minimum. This talk will discuss upcoming persistent memory technologies as well as the software challenges related to their introduction. About the speaker Prof. Dr.-Ing. André Brinkmann is a full professor at the computer science department of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and head of its data center ZDV (since 2011). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2004 from the University of Paderborn and has been an assistant professor in the computer science department of the University of Paderborn from 2008 to 2011. Furthermore, he has been the managing director of the Paderborn Centre for Parallel Computing PC2 during this time frame. His research interests focus on the application of algorithm engineering techniques in the area of data center management, cloud computing, and storage systems. He has published more than 100 papers in renowned conferences and journals and is an associated editor of the ACM Transactions on Storage as well as a steering committee member of the IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS). Prof. Brinkmann is a member of the advisory board of the French Grid'5000, the European Modular Microserver DataCentre project M2DC, and of the "Mainzer Zentrum für Digitalität in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften" mainzed.