Title: Understanding the Robustness of SSDs under Power Fault

Speaker: Feng Qin (The Ohio State University)

Time: 14:30-16:00, 20 June 2013

Venue: Lecture Room, 3rd Floor, Building #5, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

Modern storage technology (SSDs, No-SQL databases, commoditized RAID hardware, etc.) bring new reliability challenges to the already complicated storage rack. Among other things, the behavior of these new components during power faults - which happen relatively frequently in data centers - is an important yet mostly ignored issue in this dependability-critical area. In this talk, I will mainly present our recent work on exposing reliability issues in block devices under power faults. Our framework includes specially-designed hardware to inject power faults directly to devices, workloads to stress storage components, and techniques to detect various types of failures. By applying our testing framework to fifteen commodity SSDs, we have surprisingly found that thirteen out of the fifteen devices exhibit failure behavior contrary to our expectations.

Feng Qin received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State as an Assistant Professor in 2006. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. His research interests include Software Reliability, Operating Systems, High Performance Computing, and Security. He is particularly interested in developing system mechanisms to improve software availability and reliability at different software development stages. He has published papers in top system conferences in recent years. One of his papers was awarded as best papers in SOSP'05. Two of his papers won IEEE Micro Top Picks in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Three of his papers were nominated as best papers in HPCA'05, SC'07, and SC'10, respectively. He has received NSF CAREER Award in 2010.