Colloquium
Vikram Joshi and Prashanth Radhakrishnan
Fusion IO
Friday, January 13, 2012
3147 MEB
Refreshments 3:20 p.m.
Lecture 3:40 p.m.
Host: Anton Burtsev
Title: Getting a Million IOPS Through Code You Don't Own
Vikram Joshi and Prashanth Radhakrishnan
Fusion IO
Friday, January 13, 2012
3147 MEB
Refreshments 3:20 p.m.
Lecture 3:40 p.m.
Host: Anton Burtsev
Title: Getting a Million IOPS Through Code You Don't Own
Abstract
Virtualization has brought in disruptive change to the way we use compute servers allowing for greater consolidation ratios, reduction of capital expenses and energy costs, and ease of IT management. But along with the benefits have come some serious challenges, the biggest one being the I/O bottleneck for virtual machines. Most hypervisors require the use of shared storage. While the I/O demands of any single VM may not be great, the aggregate I/O requirements of many VMs running on a single server quickly add up. Primary storage vendors have been the beneficiaries and monetized this surprise blessing that landed on their laps. Flash memory has changed the way we can look at both the I/O as well as the virtual memory subsystem of operating systems, allowing us to use Flash as a part of the new memory to storage hierarchy. The ability to use Flash transparently in compute servers to offload hundreds of thousands of IOPS from primary storage is now theoretically possible but still a daunting task given the idiosyncratic nature of the Flash medium and the need to seamlessly and transparently modify commercial/proprietary operating systems to deal with high I/O loads. This talk gets into the inner workings of unifying the memory I/O subsystems of OS-es to open up the flood gates for current and future needs of I/O in virtualized environments.
BIO // Vikram Joshi
Vikram is a VP & Chief Technologist at Fusion-io. His technical background spans multiple disciplines such as operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, databases, storage, media and computer graphics. Prior to co-founding IO Turbine (acquired by Fusion-io), he founded PixBlitz Studios which developed high-definition virtual advertising technology for broadcast sports and entertainment. At Oracle, his work included doubling database performance on 12-64 way SMPs and laying the foundation for the Exadata appliance group. Vikram pioneered high-speed texture-mapped graphics for video, worked on video on demand, and video game server (CosmoSoft) at Silicon Graphics. At Sun Microsystems, he worked on the Solaris virtual memory subsystem to increase scalable OS performance up to 10X, and on the Spring Microkernel (Sunlabs). He holds a MS (Hons.) in Physics and a BE (Hons.) in Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.
BIO // Prashanth Radhakrishnan
Prashanth Radhakrishnan is a software engineer at Fusion-io, interested in most things related to systems software. He received his Master's from the University of Utah in 2007 and worked in the Flux research group as a graduate student. Prior to joining Fusion-io he was a software engineer in the Advanced Development Group at Netapp.
Virtualization has brought in disruptive change to the way we use compute servers allowing for greater consolidation ratios, reduction of capital expenses and energy costs, and ease of IT management. But along with the benefits have come some serious challenges, the biggest one being the I/O bottleneck for virtual machines. Most hypervisors require the use of shared storage. While the I/O demands of any single VM may not be great, the aggregate I/O requirements of many VMs running on a single server quickly add up. Primary storage vendors have been the beneficiaries and monetized this surprise blessing that landed on their laps. Flash memory has changed the way we can look at both the I/O as well as the virtual memory subsystem of operating systems, allowing us to use Flash as a part of the new memory to storage hierarchy. The ability to use Flash transparently in compute servers to offload hundreds of thousands of IOPS from primary storage is now theoretically possible but still a daunting task given the idiosyncratic nature of the Flash medium and the need to seamlessly and transparently modify commercial/proprietary operating systems to deal with high I/O loads. This talk gets into the inner workings of unifying the memory I/O subsystems of OS-es to open up the flood gates for current and future needs of I/O in virtualized environments.
BIO // Vikram Joshi
Vikram is a VP & Chief Technologist at Fusion-io. His technical background spans multiple disciplines such as operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, databases, storage, media and computer graphics. Prior to co-founding IO Turbine (acquired by Fusion-io), he founded PixBlitz Studios which developed high-definition virtual advertising technology for broadcast sports and entertainment. At Oracle, his work included doubling database performance on 12-64 way SMPs and laying the foundation for the Exadata appliance group. Vikram pioneered high-speed texture-mapped graphics for video, worked on video on demand, and video game server (CosmoSoft) at Silicon Graphics. At Sun Microsystems, he worked on the Solaris virtual memory subsystem to increase scalable OS performance up to 10X, and on the Spring Microkernel (Sunlabs). He holds a MS (Hons.) in Physics and a BE (Hons.) in Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.
BIO // Prashanth Radhakrishnan
Prashanth Radhakrishnan is a software engineer at Fusion-io, interested in most things related to systems software. He received his Master's from the University of Utah in 2007 and worked in the Flux research group as a graduate student. Prior to joining Fusion-io he was a software engineer in the Advanced Development Group at Netapp.