Joy Arulraj from Carnegie Mellon University

Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - 12:30pm

Computer Science - Room 105

Host: Wyatt Lloyd

“Data Management on Non-Volatile Memory”

We are at an exciting point in the evolution of memory technology. Device manufacturers have created a new non-volatile memory (NVM) technology that can serve as both system memory and storage. NVM supports fast reads and writes similar to volatile memory, but all writes to it are persistent like a solid-state disk. The advent of NVM invalidates decades of design decisions that are deeply embedded in today's database management systems (DBMSs). These systems are unable to take full advantage of NVM because their internal architectures are predicated on the assumption that memory is volatile. With NVM, many of the components of today's DBMSs are unnecessary and will degrade the performance of data-intensive applications. Thus, the best way to resolve these shortcomings is by designing a new system explicitly tailored for NVM.

In this talk, I will present my research on the design and development of an NVM DBMS, called Peloton. Peloton's architecture shows that the impact of NVM spans across all the layers of the DBMS. I will first introduce write-behind logging, an NVM-centric protocol that improves the availability of the database system by two orders-of-magnitude compared to the widely-used write-ahead logging protocol. I will then present the BzTree, an NVM-centric index data structure that illustrates how to simplify programming on NVM. In drawing broader lessons from this work, I will argue that all types of software systems, including file systems, machine-learning systems, and key-value stores, are amenable to similar architectural changes to achieve high performance and availability on NVM.

Bio:

Joy Arulraj is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in database systems and data science. As part of his dissertation work, he has studied and built the first non-volatile memory database system, called Peloton, for performing large-scale transaction processing and real-time data analytics. He is the recipient of the Carnegie Mellon Presidential Fellowship and a Samsung Ph.D. Fellowship.