STAR Group News

• [01-28-2020] Our two papers are accepted for presentation at IEEE IPDPS conference, New Orleans, May 18-22, 2020.
• [01-06-2020] Our research projects on big data and IoT are featured in CIS news letter.
• [08-26-2019] Welcome new PhD student Peiyu Liang to join our lab!
• [12-11-2018] Our paper "GearDB: A GC-free Key-Value Store on HM-SMR Drives with Gear Compaction" has been accepted for presentation at the USENIX Conf. on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'2019), acceptance rate: 26/145=18%. USENIX FAST is a premier conference in data storage systems.
• [06-22-2018] NSF CCF Award: 2018-2021, $460k. Our NSF proposal "SHF:Small: Collaborative Research: Understanding, Modeling, and System Support for HPC Data Reduction" was selected for funding.The goal of this project is to address a number of critical gaps in using data reduction for HPC-based science missions. This is a collaborative project with NJIT.
• [04-30-2018] Yuhua (co-supervised with Dr. Weijun Xiao@VCU) successfully defended his dissertation. He is going to join DataDirect Networks (DDN). Congratulations, Dr. Guo!
• [04-18-2018] Our paper "RAFI: Risk-Aware Failure Identification to Improve the RAS in Erasure-coded Data Centers" has been accepted for presentation at the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'2018), acceptance rate: 76/378=20%. This is a joint work with collaborators at HUST. USENIX ATC is a premier conference in computer systems.
• [[January 2018] Congratulations to Ting and Wenjie who both received USENIX travel grants to attend the FAST'18 conference.
• [December 2017] Our three papers have been accepted for presentation at the 32nd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'2018, acceptance rate: 24.5%). One of them titled "Understanding and Modeling Lossy Compression Schemes on HPC Scientific Data" is nomintaed as the best paper candidate (http://www.ipdps.org/).
• [December 2017] Dr. He is the program co-chair for the IEEE IPCCC'2017 conference, held in San Diego, CA. The IPCCC is a premier IEEE conference presenting research in the performance of computer and communication systems (http://www.ipccc.org/).
• [10-12-2017] Welcome Professor Dan Feng to visit STAR lab. She is the Dean of the School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technoloy (HUST). She is also the Director of the Data Storage and Application Lab at HUST.
• [August 2017] NSF CCF Award: 2017-2020, $310k. Our NSF CCF proposal titled "SHF:Small: Collaborative Research: Tailoring Memory Systems for Data-Intensive HPC Applications" was selected for funding. This project aims to to address the research challenges in building an efficient memory system by designing new techniques from several aspects. This is a joint project with Gary Liu from NJIT.
• [5-17-2017] Kun successfully defended his dissertation. He is going to join Amazon in Seattle. Congratulations, Dr. Tang!
• [August 2016] Dr. He joined the faculty in the Department of CIS at Temple University.
• [2-29-2016] Our paper "Power-aware Checkpointing: Toward the Optimal Checkpointing Interval under Power Capping" has been accepted for presentation at the 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2016), acceptance rate: 58/259=22%. This is a joint work with collaborators at ORNL.
• [11-28-2015] Our paper "Successor: Proactive Cache Warm-up of Destination Hosts in Virtual Machine Migration Contexts" has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM'2016), acceptance rate: 300/1644=18.2%. INFOCOM is a top ranked conference on networking.
• [08-18-2015] NSF CCF Award: 2015-2017, $300k. Our NSF CCF proposal titled "Adaptive Shared Memory Management for Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Architectures" was selected for funding (PI: Weijun Xiao, Co-PI: Xubin He). This project aims to address the challenges in exploring shared memory management schemes for heterogeneous architectures.
• [03-02-2015] Our paper "Reducing Fragmentation for In-line Deduplication Backup Storage via Exploiting Backup History and Cache Knowledge" is accepted for publication by the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).
• [02-23-2015] Welcome Professor Dan Feng to visit STAR lab. She is the Associate Dean for Research of the School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technoloy (HUST). She is also the Director of the Data Storage and Application Lab at HUST.
• [02-01-2015] Our paper "An Efficient Page-level FTL to Optimize Address Translation in Flash Memory" is accepted for presentation at the European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys'2015), acceptance rate: 32/150=21%. Eurosys is a premier conference in computer systems research.
• [01-26-2015] Congratulations to Benjamin and Yuhua who both received a USENIX travel award to attend FAST'15 conference.
• [12-08-2014] Our paper "Design Tradeoffs for Data Deduplication Performance in Backup Workloads" has been accepted for presentation at the 13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'2015), acceptance rate: 28/130=21.5%. This is a joint work with collaborators at HUST. FAST is a premier conference in data storage systems.
• [11-25-2014] Ben Young is named as the Best DURI Scholar at the VCU SoE Undergraduate Research Symposium. Ben was a DURI fellow and received his BS degree this Summer and is currently a graduate student working in the STAR lab.
• [11-16-2014] Dr. He and two of his graduate students attend the Super Computing conference (SC'14) held in New Orleans. Both students Morgan Stuart and Ben Young presented their research at the 9th Parallel Data Storage workshop as their debut in an international conference.
• [08-08-2014] Our paper "Clique Migration: Affinity Grouping of Virtual Machines for Inter-Cloud Live Migration" receives "Best Student Paper Award" at the 9th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Networking, Architecture and Storage (NAS). Congratulations to Tao, Morgan, and Kun.
• [07-01-2014] Dr. He is invited to give a talk at ORNL on high performance and reliable storage support for big data.
• [04-08-2014] Our two papers titled “FlexECC: Partially Relaxing ECC of MLC SSD for Better Cache Performance” and “Accelerating Restore and Garbage Collection in Deduplication-based Backup Systems via Exploiting Historical Information” have been accepted for publication at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC’2014), acceptance rate: 15% (36 out of 241 submissions).
• [02-04-2014] NSF CSR Award: 2014-2016, $318k. Our NSF CSR proposal was selected for funding (PI: Xubin He). This project aims to address the scalability challenge for storage systems in large data centers.
• [01-26-2014] Our paper "An Aggressive Worn-out Flash Block Management Scheme to Alleviate SSD Performance Degradation" is accepted for presentation at the European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys'2014), acceptance rate: 27/147=18%. Eurosys is a premier conference in computer systems research.
• [01-25-2014] Congratulations to Pradeep and Kun who both received a USENIX travel award to attend FAST'14 conference.
• [01-12-2014] Welcome Benjamin Young to join our STAR lab. Ben is one of the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Initiative (DURI) awardees.
• [08-28-2013] Weclome three new graduate students to join our STAR lab: Morgan Stuart, Kun Tang, and Yuhua Guo.
• [06-14-2013] Our paper "A Flexible Framework to Enhance RAID-6 Scalability via Exploiting the Similarities among MDS Codes" is accepted for presentation at the 42nd International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP'2013) as a full paper, acceptance rate: 30% (59 out of 193 submissions).
• [06-12-2013] Guanying successfully defended his PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Wu!
• [05-22-2013] Our paper "Exploiting Workload Dynamics to Improve SSD Read Latency via Differentiated Error Correction Codes" is accepted for publication by ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES).
• [03-18-2013] Welcome Dr. Ping Huang to join our STAR group as a postdoc researcher.
• [02-06-2013] Our paper "Hint-K: An Efficient Multi-level Cache Using K-step Hints" is accepted for publication by the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).
• [01-26-2013] Congratulations to Tao and Morgan who both received a USENIX travel award to attend FAST'13 conference. FAST is a premier conference in data storage systems.
• [01-23-2013] Dr. He is named as the USENIX VCU campus representative.
• [11-15-2012] Chentao successfully defended his dissertation. He is going to join the faculty of Shanghai Jiaotong University. Congratulations, Dr. Wu!
• [09-28-2012] VCU Engineering selected as NVIDIA CUDA teaching center. Details can be found here.
• [09-12-2012] Our paper "An Efficient Penalty-Aware Cache to Improve the Performance of Parity-Based Disk Arrays under Faulty Conditions" is published by the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).
• [08-28-2012] NSF Award: 2012-2015, $430k. Our NSF CSR proposal was selected for funding (PI: Xubin He). This grant allows us to investigate cost effective solutions using erasure codes for big data management in large data centers.
• [06-30-2012] Our paper "SDM: A Stripe-based Data Migration Scheme to Improve the Scalability of RAID-6" is accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster'2012), acceptance rate: 28.86%.
• [05-27-2012] Our paper "GSR: A Global Stripe-based Redistribution Approach to Accelerate RAID-5 Scaling" is accepted for presentation at the 41st International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP'2012), acceptance rate: 28%.
• [04-26-2012] Congratulations to Chentao Wu! He is the recipient of the 2011-2012 VCU School of Engineering Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award.
• [02-10-2012] Congratulations to Guanying who received a USENIX travel award to attend FAST'12 conference and present a paper. FAST is a premier conference in data storage systems.
• [01-08-2012] Our paper "Delta FTL: Improving SSD Lifetime via Exploiting Content Locality",is accepted for presentation at the European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys'2012), acceptance rate: 27/178=15%.
• [12-05-2011] Our paper "Reducing SSD Read Latency via NAND Flash Program and Erase Suspension" is accepted for presentation at the 10th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '12), acceptance rate: 26/137=19%.
• [06-20-2011] Our paper "An Adaptive Write Buffer Management Scheme for Flash-based SSD" was accepted to appear in ACM Transactions on Storage.
• [04-01-2011] Dr. He gives an invited talk at George Washington University.
• [03-18-2011] Our paper "Victim Disk First: An Asymmetric Cache to Boost the  Performance of Disk Arrays under Faulty Conditions" is accepted for presentation at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Portland, OR, June 15-17, 2011(acceptance rate: 27/180=15%).
• [02-24-2011] Our paper "HDP Code: A Horizontal-Diagonal Parity Code to Optimize I/O Load Balancing in RAID-6" is accepted to be presented at DSN'2011, Hongkong, China, June 27-30, 2011 (Acceptance Rate 17.6%).
• [02-08-2011] Our PhD students, Guanying and Chentao both received the USENIX travel grants to attend FAST'2011 conference, San Jose, CA, Feb 12-17, 2011. Congratulations!
• [02-01-2011] Welcome two new undergraduate students,Vladislav Sorkin and David Lyons, to join STAR lab to perform NSF REU research.
• [01-03-2011] Welcome Dr. Huailiang Tan, a visiting professor. He will work in Dr. He's STAR group for one year.
• [12-28-2010] Dr. He is invited to serve as the Proceedings Chair for Cluster'2011.
• [12-19-2010] Dr. He gives a keynote speech at the 3rd International Conference on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Programming (PAAP'2010), DaLian, China.
• [12-18-2010] Our paper "H-Code: A Hybrid MDS Array Code to Optimize Partial Stripe Writes in RAID-6" is accepted to be presented at IPDPS'2011, Anchorage, Alaska, May 16-20,2011 (Acceptance Rate: 19.6%, 112 out of 571 submissions).
• [9-16-2010]Chentao Wu presents a paper entitled "Hint-K: An Efficient Multi-level Cache Using K-step Hints" at the 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing in San Diego.
• [8-17-2010]Guying Wu presents a paper entitled "DiffECC: Improving SSD Read Performance Using Differentiated Error Correction Coding Schemes" at the18th Annual Meeting of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, in Miami Beach. Acceptance rate: 16%. This paper is one of the Best Paper Award candidates.
• [8-16-2010]Dr. He joins the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University.
• [7-16-2010]Dr. He presents a paper titled"Characterizing the Dependability of Distributed Storage Systems Using a Two-layer Hidden Markov Model-Based Approach" at the 5th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS), in Macau, China. This paper wins the Best Paper Award!
• [6-24-2010]Ben Eckart successfully defended his M.S. thesis and he will join CMU to pursue a PhD. Congratulations, Ben!
• [6-23-2010]Xin Chen successfully defended his dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Chen!
• [5-25-2010]C. Wu, X. He, Q. Cao, and C. Xie, "Hint-K: An Efficient Multi-level Cache Using K-step Hints", accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing, September 13-16, San Diego, USA
• [5-25-2010] G. Wu, X. He, N. Xie, and T. Zhang, "DiffECC: Improving SSD Read Performance Using Differentiated Error Correction Coding Schemes", accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the18th Annual Meeting of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, August 17-19, Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Acceptance rate: 16%.
• [4-23-2010] Dr. He is the winner of the TTU 2010 Sigma Xi Research Award, which recognizes his excellence in publication and research.
• [4-23-2010] Dr. He is recognized as the Most Outstanding ECE Teacher of the Year 2010.
• [4-18-2010] X. Chen, J. Warren, F. Han, and X. He, "Characterizing the Dependability of Distributed Storage Systems Using a Two-layer Hidden Markov Model-Based Approach," accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS), July 15-17, Macau, China.
• [2-28-2010] S. Wan, Q. Cao, C. Xie, B. Eckart, and X. He, "Code-M: A Non-MDS Erasure Code Scheme to Support Fast Recovery from up to Two-Disk Failures in Storage Systems," accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the 40th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN2010), June 28-July 1, 2010, Chicago, USA.
• [2-10-2010] L. McNeese, G. Wu, and X. He, "The Hot Pages Associative Translation Layer for Solid State Drives, " Work in progress report, the 8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST2010), Feb 23-26, 2010.
• [2-10-2010] F. Aderholdt, B. Eckart, X. He, and S. Scott, "Investigating Locality Reformations for Cluster Virtualization", Poster presentation, the 8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST2010), Feb 23-26, 2010.
• [11-13-2009] James presents our research on availability benchmarking at the 20th annual Argonne Symposium for undergraduates in Chicago. Jimmy has been working in STAR lab to conduct NSF REU research since June 2009.
• [09-18-09]HE's NSF proposal "Cross-Layer Exploration of Non-Volatile Solid-State Memories to Achieve Effective I/O Stack for High-Performance Computing Systems" was selected for funding (PI: Xubin He). This three-year collaborative project is conducted by PIs from U. of Florida, Tennessee Tech U., and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
• [09-17-09] Welcome a new undergraduate student, Luke McNeese, to join STAR lab to perform NSF REU research. He is currently a senior in computer science.
• [08-24-09]X. Chen, J. Langston, X. He, S. Scott, "Design and Evaluation of a User-Oriented Availability Benchmark for Distributed File Systems", International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems, Cambridge, MA (accepted).
• [08-18-09]X. He, L. Ou, C. Engelmann, X. Chen, and S. Scott, "Symmetric Active/Active Metadata Service for High Availability Parallel File Systems", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, accepted.
• [08-10-09]Welcome a new graduate student, Ms. Fang Han, to join STAR lab.
• [08-06-09]HE's NSF HECURA proposal "Automatic Identification of I/O Bottleneck and Run-time Optimization for Cluster Virtualization" was selected for funding (PI: Xubin He, Co-PI: Stephen Scott). This three-year award will allow He and his STAR group to collaborate with ORNL to conduct cutting-edge research on I/O bottleneck idententification, profiling, and optimization for cluster virtualization.
• [07-01-09]X. Liu, J. Han, Y. Zhong, C. Han, and X. He, "Implementing WebGIS on Hadoop: A Case Study of Improving Small File I/O Performance on HDFS", IEEE Cluster, New Orleans, LA, Aug. 31-Sept. 4, 2009 (accepted).
• [06-06-09]Welcome Jimmy Warren to join STAR lab. Jimmy is a senior undergraduate and he will conduct research on high availability benchmarking with other STAR lab members.
• [04-27-09]B. Eckart, X. He, H. Ong, S. Scott, "An Extensible I/O Performance Analysis Framework for Distributed Environments", Euro-Par, Delft, The Netherlands, August 25-28, 2009 (accepted, 85 out of 257 submissions).
• [02-17-09]B. Eckart, X. He, Q. Wu, C. Xie, "A Dynamic Performance-Based Flow Control Method for High-Speed Data Transfer", IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, accepted.
• [10-31-08]Shenggang Wan, Qiang Cao, Xubin He, Changsheng Xie, and Chentao Wu, "An Adaptive Cache Management Using Dual LRU Stacks to Improve Buffer Cache Performance", 27th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communication Conference (IPCCC), Austin, Dec 7-9, 2008 (accepted).
• [10-13-08]Welcome Ms. Jane Mao as a visiting scholar to STAR lab.
• [09-30-08]Dr. Hong Ong, an ORNL research scientist, gives a talk on virtualization to STAR lab.
• [08-25-08]Xin Chen and Xubin He, "Tolerating Temporal Correlated Failures from Cyclic Dependency in High Performance Computing Systems,"The 14th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS'2008), Australia, Dec. 8-10, 2008 (Acceptance Rate: ~30% out of 221 submissions).
• [07-07-08]Li Ou, Xubin He, and Jizhong Han, “An Effective Design for Fast Memory Registration in RDMA”, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, accepted, 2008.
• [06-12-08] Dr. He is invited to serve as the general co-chair of IEEE NAS'2009 conference.
• [05-18-08]Ben Eckart, Xin Chen, Xubin He, and Stephen Scott, “Failure Prediction Models for Proactive Fault Tolerance Within Storage Environment”, The16th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS’2008), September 8-10, Baltimore, MD (Acceptance Rate: 36 out of 94 submissions).
• [02-22-08]Manjeera Jeedigunta and Xubin He, “Evaluation of Data Dissemination Methods in Wireless Sensor Networks,” 2008 International Conference on Wireless Networks, Las Vegas, Nevada, July 14-17, 2008 (acceptance rate: 29%).
• [04-02-08] Congratulations to Ben Eckart for winning the 2008 TTU Derryberry Award.
• [03-28-08] Dr. He is invited to serve as the guest editor for a special issue on parallel and distributed computing, International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking.
• [03-16-08] Xin Chen, Ben Eckart, Xubin He, Christian Engelmann, Stephen Scott, "An Online Controller towards Self-adaptive File System Availability and Performance," 5th High Availability and Performance Computing Workshop (HAPCW'08), Denver, April 2-4, 2008 (accepted).
• [03-06-08] Dr. He is elevated to IEEE senior member grade.
• [02-29-08] Ben Eckart and Xubin He, Best Poster Award, NSF REU PI Meeting 2008, Austin, Texas.
• [02-27-08] Dr. He attends the NSF REU PI meeting in Austin and re-unites with his first PhD student, Dr. Li Ou, who is with the Scalable Systems Research group of Dell.
• [02-26-08] Ben Eckart, Xin Chen, and Xubin He, A Failure Prediction Model for Disk arrays, High Performance Computer Science Symposium, Denver, April 2-4, 2008 (accepted).
• [02-21-08] Congratulations to Ben Eckart for winning the EJC scholarship.
• [12-08-07] Ben Eckart, Xubin He, and Qishi Wu, “Performance Adaptive UDP for High-Speed Bulk Data Transfer over Dedicated Links”, 22nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2008), April 2008, acceptance rate: 25% (accepted).
• [11-30-07] Christian Engelmann, Stephen Scott, C. Leangsuksun, and Xubin He, “Symmetric Active/Active Replication for Dependent Services,” International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES) 2008, Barcelona, Spain, March 4-7, 2008, acceptance rate: 21% (accepted).
• [09-24-07] Dr. He chairs the 4th IEEE International Workshop on Storage Network Architecture and Parallel I/Os (SNAPI), San Diego.
• [08-31-07] Dr. He receives Outstanding Service Award, International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications (ISPA-07).
• [08-15-08] NSF Computer System Research (CSR) award, "A Benchmarking Framework for High-Availability Distributed Storage Systems", 2007-2010 (PI: Xubin He, Co-PI: Stephen Scott).
• [07-08-07] Dr. He is invited to serve as the program co-chair of IEEE NAS'2008 conference.
• [04-2007] Xubin He, Li Ou, Martha Kosa, Stephen Scott, and Christian Engelmann, “A Unified Cache for High Performance Cluster Storage Systems”, International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2007, pp. 97-109.