Center for Research in Intelligent Storage

The growth rate of data has been rapidly increasing over the past decade. This growth has pushed data quantities to a point where users and administrators have difficulty finding and managing files. UC Santa Cruz researchers are addressing this problem by integrating search and indexing into storage systems. We have designed scalable indexes that enable a number of powerful search capabilities across billions of files. Users can quickly find files with specific properties and issue range, nearest neighbor, or top-k queries, for example, 'which 10 files consume the most storage?' or 'what are my most recently accessed presentation files?'. In addition, queries can be issued across specific sub-trees, across an multiple nodes, or across an entire storage system's history. Our index utilizes data structures specifically designed for the properties of large-scale storage systems, such as, highly skewed data distributions and hierarchical files, that provide much better performance and scalability than existing approaches.

The Center for Research in Intelligent Storage (CRIS) is a partnership between universities and industry, featuring high-quality, industrially relevant fundamental research, strong industrial support of collaboration in research and education, and direct transfer of university developed ideas, research results, and technology to U.S. industry to improve its competitive posture in world markets. Through innovative education of talented graduate and undergraduate students, CRIS is providing the next generation of scientists and engineers with a broad, industrially oriented perspective on engineering research and practice.

Center Mission and Rationale

The goal of the Center for Research in Intelligent Storage (CRIS) is to push the boundaries of file and storage systems by exploring and developing new technologies and techniques to improve the usability, scalability, security, reliability, and performance of storage systems.

The Center is established in the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Minnesota, universities with strong ties to the storage system industry: Silicon Valley and Minneapolis have long been centers of the storage industry in the United States. Research projects in the Center are supported by industrial members, and the Center encourages frequent participation by industry employees in the projects: participation in weekly meetings via phone call, email discussions, and face-to-face meetings. The Center encourages students to engage member companies via summer internships, facilitating technology transfer and building strong ties that can result in full-time employment after graduation.

Support

The Center is primarily supported by its industrial membership and by funding from the National Science Foundation. The Center is part of the Industry & University Cooperative Research Program (I/UCRC) at NSF.