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NSF Supports Computer Science Research

Researchers in many fields share a common problem: Searching giant parameter spaces is incredibly time consuming and inefficient. To help remedy this issue, the National Science Foundation has funded 鈥淐NS Core: III: Medium: Collaborative Research: Optimizing and Understanding Large Parameter Spaces in Storage Systems,鈥� a project developed by computer science professor Geoff Kuenning and his Stony Brook University colleagues, computer science professors Klaus Mueller and Erez Zadok.

鈥淎聽parameter space is a mathematical concept referring to the total聽number of choices available,鈥� Kuenning says.聽鈥淔or example, if I have 10 shirts聽and 10 pairs of pants, I have 10×10 = 100 different outfits聽because each pair of pants can be worn with 10 different shirts.聽That’s great for wardrobe variety and for packing light, but聽terrible if you’re trying to find the best shirt/pants combination聽by trial and error.聽If you add 10 pairs of socks, 10 belts and聽10 hats, you’re up to 100,000 outfits generated by only 50 pieces聽of clothing.聽That’s a parameter space, which is what we’re trying聽to search鈥攑referably not by trying on all 100,000 outfits!鈥�

The team will test a combination of enhanced black box-optimization methods, machine learning and visual analytics on information systems from cloud data centers to smartphones to embedded systems, such as wireless routers.

鈥淲e鈥檙e figuring out ways to optimize existing software,鈥� says Kuenning. 鈥淚n any storage system, the software has what we call knobs, parameters that the user can set in a search. Each system has many, many parameters that interact with each other in complicated ways, so trying to pick the best setting of all of these parameters to get the best performance for a specific situation is an overwhelming task.鈥�

Beyond improving storage systems, a significant improvement to the performance of storage systems worldwide will save energy costs and benefit the environment. The project鈥檚 comprehensive research agenda has the potential to make such optimization significantly simpler and far more effective, which can bring direct benefits to consumers, businesses and the U.S. government. 鈥淎lthough our focus here is on storage systems, we expect that many of the lessons learned and some of the tools and techniques would apply to other domains, for example, optimizing networks or data centers,鈥� Kuenning says.

In 2017, Kuenning鈥檚 NSF-funded project 鈥淐ollaborative Research: CI-SUSTAIN: National File System Trace Repository,鈥� addressed a longstanding problem in the study of computer systems: the difficulty of providing workloads to drive the system being studied. Kuenning successfully developed and deployed the Storage Networking Industry Association鈥檚 I/O Tools, Traces and Analysis (IOTTA), a national repository for file system traces. The repository has proven its worth to the scientific community and is being used by researchers in a wide variety of projects. Initially, the life of the repository was expected to be only a few years, but its utility and popularity suggest that it will be needed for at least another decade, and possibly far longer.

Kuenning鈥檚 share of the current grant is $264,875 and includes support for two student researchers per year for four years. NSF grants are the largest share of external support for faculty research at 无忧视频.