Parallel File Systems, High-performance Input/Output Storage systems, Operating Systems, Memory Management
My research interests have been in the fields of Parallel File Systems and Virtual Memory Management algorithms in Operating Systems. In particular, I have focused on efficient buffer-management strategies for large-scale I/O intensive scientific applications to reduce their execution time overheads. In my thesis, I have explored efficient caching and replacement algorithms for programs that use explicit I/O interfaces and for scaled versions of in-core applications whose virtual memory footprint is larger than available physical memory. The underlying theme of the solutions that I have proposed, exploits application-level access pattern characteristics that are automatically gleaned by the compiler or by the operating system.Given that caching and efficient buffer management could improve the performance of applications, the need to maintain a consistent view of the cached copies could degrade performance. As part of my current work, I am trying to understand this trade-off in performance due to aggressive caching and the need to maintain coherence/consistency in the context of a parallel file system (PVFS2, CAPFS).