The advent of byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (BNVM) presents an opportunity to rethink the entire system stack. We present Twizzler, an operating system redesign for this near-future. Twizzler removes the kernel from the I/O path, provides programs with memory-style access to persistent data using cross-object pointers, and enables simple and efficient long-term sharing of data both between applications and between runs of a individual application. Twizzler provides a clean-slate I/O model for memory-mapped persistent data, realizing the vision of Unix in a world of persistent RAM. We show how Twizzler is simpler, more extensible and more secure than existing I/O models and implementations though building real software for Twizzler, while measuring the performance of persistent pointer translation (0.4-5.8 ns), Twizzler operations compared to Unix (43x speedup), and a performance analysis of SQLite on Twizzler, showing an improvement in query latency of 1.96--660x for most queries. I will conclude the talk with a brief overview of some of the other research projects at the University of California, Santa Cruz Center for Research in Storage Systems, including non-volatile memory systems and archival storage.
Ethan L. Miller is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Veritas Presidential Chair in Storage and is the Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and his publications have received multiple Best Paper awards. Prof. Miller received an Sc.B. from Brown University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1995, and has been on the UC Santa Cruz faculty since 2000. He has co-authored over 150 papers in a range of topics in file and storage systems, operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, and computer security. He was a member of the team that developed Ceph, a scalable high-performance distributed file system for scientific computing that is now being adopted by several high-end computing organizations. His work on reliability and security for distributed storage is also widely recognized, as is his work on secure, efficient long-term archival storage. His current research projects, which are funded by the National Science Foundation and industry support for CRSS, include system support for byte-addressable non-volatile memory, archival storage systems, reliable and secure storage systems, and issues in ultra-scale storage systems. Prof. Miller has also worked closely with industry to help move research results into commercial use at companies such as Pure Storage, NetApp, and Veritas. Additional information is available at https://www.crss.ucsc.edu/person/elm.html.