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Efficient Key-Value store for future hardware

Summary

The systems lab is looking for 3 PhD students to work on operating systems and databases. The objective will be to maximizing performance, minimizing energy usage and improving the reliability of systems. The three available positions will allow the PhD student to work with future technology (very fast SSDs and persistent memory), or improve the reliability of the Linux kernel/Android systems.

The objective of the project is to design an efficient key-value store for future hardware, using fast NVMe SSDs and persistent byte-addressable memory. We aim to rethink the way data is stored in memory and on disk to design a fast key-value store for modern drives and persistent memory. The project will start with a study of the characteristics of persistent memory. Then existing data-structures designed for volatile DRAM will be ported and optimized for persistent memory. Finally, new designs will be proposed.
Contact Baptiste Lepers to discuss, sending a CV, transcript and short summary of why you are interested.

Supervisor

Dr Baptiste Lepers.

Research location

Computer Science

Program type

PHD

Synopsis

In our modern digital life, activities from buying clothes to accessing government services depend on working with computer applications which store information in a long-lasting form, that is, they need a data store, where information (called "values") is found using a label or "key", So the key-value store is vital for the functionality and performance of all applications. Even relational databases typically contain a key-value store as a storage engine, underneath layers that support a richer query model.
The current key-value stores are designed for today's typical hardware environment with a memory hierarchy of slow but capacious hard disk, flash-based SSD, and fast but limited and volatile RAM.

Currently, no key-value store can leverage the speed of fast NVMe SSDs and byte-addressable persistent memory - existing key-value stores become CPU bound before reaching the limit of these devices.

Additional information

Requirements: fluent C, C++, or Rust programming, notions of good practices in optimizations and efficient programming.All PhDs will be supervised by Baptiste Lepers and Willy Zwaenepoel (Dean of the Faculty of Engineering).

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Opportunity ID

The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is 2908

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