In the context of global warming, reducing the carbon emissions of computer systems is a top priority. Data centers are responsible for a large fraction of the carbon emissions of IT.
Storage is a significant contributor to the carbon footprint of data centers [1]. To ensured that data remains available despite crashes RAID techniques are widely used [2]. Replicating data in multiple devises has a cost that can be reduced by using erasure codes [3] with technique such as RAID 5 or Raid 6. However, when considering as main objective the reduction of the carbon footprint of storage, it is unclear whether coding techniques are beneficial: It reduces the storage space but increases the CPU usage.
The goal of this internship is to study under which conditions erasure coding techniques can be beneficial to reduce the carbon footprint of storage when storing data on SSDs.
The intern will be in charge of the following tasks:
Studying recent publications and collecting information about erasure coding techniques for SSDs.
Running experimental campaigns on our large-scale private Cloud platform, to analyze the energy/performance trade-off provided by different erasure coding techniques. Our platform is instrumented to be able to measure precisely the energy consumed by storage devices.
Analyzing the results to provide recommendations about how to minimize the carbon footprint of reliable storage.
[1] S. McAllister et al., A call for research on storage emissions. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems (HotCarbon), 2024.
[2] A. Kim et al. Morph: Efficient File-Lifetime Redundancy Management for Cluster File Systems. Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 30th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. 2024.
[3] Z. Li et al. Flash-oriented Coded Storage: Research Status and Future Directions. ACM Transactions on Storage (2024).
The intern will join the Informatics Laboratory of Univ. Grenoble Alpes (LIG), one of the largest laboratory in Computer Science in France. Univ. Grenoble Alpes is one of the 50 best universities in the world for computer science according to international rankings.
More specifically, the intern will work in the KrakOS research team, that focus on the efficiency and robustness of systems. KrakOS is one of the top system research teams in France and in Europe, with publications in the most selective conferences of the domain.