CS Student Published in Top Storage Systems Conference

Fourth year PhD student, Shuanglong Zhang, has been conducting research in the storage systems area as his dissertation topic under the guidance of Prof. Andy Wang. His recent work on composite-file file systems has been published in the paper titled “The Composite-file File System: Decoupling the One-to-One Mapping of Files and Metadata for Better Performance”. The paper was co-authored with Helen Catanese and Andy Wang in USENIX FAST 2016, a top tier conference in the storage systems area. In the paper, Shuanglong proposed to decouple the rigid one-to-one mapping between files and metadata with a new concept of composite files to allow many-to-one mappings. This creates an entire class of optimizations. Empirical evaluation shows up to  27% performance gain.