[talks] Xiaozhou Li will present his Pre-FPO on 12/9/15 in CS 401 at 10am

Nicki Gotsis ngotsis at CS.Princeton.EDU
Tue Dec 8 09:17:22 EST 2015


Xiaozhou Li will present his Pre-FPO on 12/9/15 in CS 401 at 10am.

The members of his committee are: Mike Freedman (adviser), Kyle Jamieson, Michael Kaminsky (Intel Labs), Jennifer Rexford, and Kai Li. 

Below are the title and abstract of his talk.

Title: Towards High-performance and Cost-effective Key-Value Storage 

Abstract: 
Key-value storage is one of the fundamental building blocks for today’s 
large-scale, high-performance data-intensive applications. In this talk, 
I will present my research on improving the performance and scalability 
of key-value storage in a cost effective manner, with a particular focus 
on combining new hardware and infrastructure capabilities with 
carefully-crafted algorithmic techniques. 

I will first present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a 
high-throughput and memory-efficient concurrent hash table. The design 
arises from careful attention to systems-level optimizations such as 
minimizing critical section length and reducing interprocessor coherence 
traffic through algorithm re-engineering. We exploited Intel’s recent 
hardware transactional memory (HTM) for concurrency control, and 
found that HTM provides software engineering benefits by reducing the 
intellectual complexity of locking more than it provides performance 
benefits. Algorithmic optimizations that benefit both HTM and designs 
for fine-grained locking are needed to achieve high performance. 

In the second part of this talk, I will present SwitchKV, a new scalable 
key-value store system design that combines high-performance cache 
nodes with resource constrained backend nodes to provide load 
balancing in the face of unpredictable workload skew. The cache nodes 
absorb the hottest queries so that no individual backend node is 
over-burdened. Compared with previous designs, SwitchKV exploits 
SDN techniques and deeply optimized switch hardware to enable 
efficient content based routing. Programmable network switches keep 
track of cached keys and route requests to the appropriate nodes at line 
speed, based on keys encoded in packet headers. A new hybrid caching 
strategy keeps cache and switch forwarding rules updated with low 
overhead and ensures that system load is always well-balanced under 
rapidly changing workloads. We demonstrate SwitchKV can meet the 
service-level objectives for many cloud services more efficiently than 
traditional systems. 


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