CS Seminar: An Overview of Emerging New Memory Technologies and Their Implications for System Software

Tuesday, August 20 2013, 11:00 AM - noon
Room 3507, Nguyen Engineering Building

Sam Noh
School of Computer and Information Engineering, Hong-Ik University, South Korea

Abstract
New memory technologies which have characteristics of both a storage device, with its non-volatilty, and conventional DRAM, with byte addressability, are currently being developed by all major semiconductor companies. In this talk, I will give an overview of the so-called next generation memory technology arena, briefly discussing the characteristics of the various next generation memory technologies that are in development. Then, and more importantly, I will discuss the system software issues that we may have to revisit with the advent of these new types of memory. Finally, as an example of its use, I will present one recent work, which we call UBJ (Unioning of the Buffer cache and Journaling), that provides a simple and yet elegant way of exploiting the non- volatile characteritic of next generation memory for performance and reliability enhancements.

*The paper where UBJ is proposed received the best paper award at the 11th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST’13). 

Speaker's Bio
Sam H. Noh received the BS degree in computer engineering from the Seoul National University, Korea in 1986, and the PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park in 1993. He held a visiting faculty position at the George Washington University from 1993 to 1994 before joining Hong-Ik University in Seoul Korea, where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Information Engineering. He has served as PC at various major conferences throughout the years, more recently for the IEEE RTCSA and the USENIX FAST. His research interests are in operating system issues pertaining to embedded/computer systems in general. In particular, his main focus of research has been on use of flash memory and new emerging memory technologies in systems. (Check out htttp://next.hongik.ac.kr for more details.)