Data Management for Flash Disks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Data Management for Flash Disks"

Mr. Jun YANG


Abstract:

The main objective of this survey is to introduce the new persistent 
storage device, flash disks, and present the state-of-art techniques of 
data management on it. The advent of flash disks have the potential to 
bring the revolution to traditional storage devices. Nowadays, as their 
capacity increases and price decreases, they are becoming more and more 
suitable for comprehensive and complicated use. They are capable of 
providing not only remarkable bandwidth, but also excellent random access 
performance which is orders of magnitude better than magnetic disks. 
However, flash memory that used in flash disks has many unique 
characteristics that lead traditional data management algorithms designed 
for magnetic disks perform badly with flash disks. More specifically, the 
symmetric I/O that sequential(random) reads and sequential(random) writes 
have the same speed no longer exists. In flash disks, while random reads 
have the same speed as sequential reads, random writes and in-place 
updates are orders of magnitude slower than sequential writes, and the 
overall read speed is much faster than write speed.

This survey discusses techniques that aim to fully utilize flash disks in 
order to further improve the efficiency of data management. Those 
optimizations are in different components of existing systems including 
storage management, buffer management, transaction management, query 
processing, indexing and sorting. Some detailed performance study for 
particular use of flash disks are also covered. Their results suggest that 
optimizations for data management on flash disks can be done in various 
aspects. Finally we have the conclusion that data management on flash 
disks is a very promising area for researchers pursuing high performance 
data management and it's just the beginning.


Date:     		Friday, 16 January 2009

Time:                   2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 3494
 			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Dr. Qiong Luo (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Dimitris Papadias (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky
 			Prof. Lionel Ni


**** ALL are Welcome ****