Full Program

In this talk, I will describe observations about file systems and storage from the perspective of a practicing engineer, especially focusing on issues of deployability and economic considerations and how these issues have lead to the success or failures of various storage ideas. This talk is targeted towards software engineers, open source developers and academics who are interested in improving their impact on the industry.

Theodore Ts'o is the first North American Linux kernel developer, having started working on Linux in September, 1991. He also served as the tech lead for the MIT Kerberos V5, and served as a chair of IP Security working group at the IETF. He previously served as CTO for the Linux Foundation, and is currently employed at Google. Theodore is the maintainer of the ext4 file system in the Linux kernel.

50 years ago magnetic core memory (which was incidentally persistent) was a leading memory technology, and it was scaling fast until...DRAM appeared. What would Core World — an alternate core memory-only computing reality where persistence is the default — look like? Answering this question has important implications for modern computing systems, since persistent memory is now a reality. In this talk, I’ll share my thoughts on Core World and share some recent exploration of what data abstractions and programming languages might look like in world where persistence was a given.

Steven Swanson is the professor and Halicioğlu Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and the director of the Non-volatile Systems Laboratory. His research interests include the systems, architecture, security, and reliability issues surrounding heterogeneous memory/storage systems, especially those that incorporate non-volatile, solid-state memories. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, Google Faculty Awards, a Facebook Faculty Award, and been a NetApp Faculty Fellow. He is a co-founder of the Non-Volatile Memories Workshop. In previous lives, he worked on low-power co-processors for irregular applications and building scalable dataflow architectures. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006 and his undergraduate degree from the University of Puget Sound in 1999.