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The RAMCloud project is creating a new class of high-speed storage for datacenters, where all data is kept in DRAM at all times. RAMCloud is a software system that aggregates the DRAM of thousands of servers into a single large-scale and extremely fast storage system (small objects can be read from any server in the same datacenter in 5-10 microseconds, which is 100-1000x faster than today's disk-based storage systems). The end goal is to make exciting new applications possible by pushing the boundaries of scale and latency in datacenter storage systems. This is a large, open-source project headed by Professors John Ousterhout and Mendel Rosenblum, and there are four full-time graduate students currently working on various aspects of the system. We are committed to making RAMCloud a robust, production-ready system, rather than just a research prototype. We currently build and test RAMCloud on an 80-node, 320-core Linux cluster with an aggregate of nearly 2 TB of main memory and 20 TB of flash storage, all connected by a high-performance Infiniband network. CS 140 and CS 144 provide good background for students interested in this project, though they are not essential.
Proposal 1: Web Dashboard for Cluster Monitoring & Management
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RAMCloud currently consists of about 75,000 lines of C++, docs, and unit tests, but it is far from complete. In this project students will work on one or more aspects of the RAMCloud implementation, such as the following: making more pieces of the system multithreaded to increase server throughput; expanding the simple read/write operations with additional operators (such as atomic increment); improving the crash-recovery system, which recovers so quickly after server crashes that most users don't even notice the crash; or implementing additional operations to support the development of a Web-based dashboard for RAMCloud. For this project prior experience with C++ is highly desirable; however, students skilled in C and familiar with other object-oriented languages like Java should be able to learn C++ on the job. CS 140 and CS 144 provide good background for students interested in this project, though they are not essential.
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Should probably have a reference to the wiki, and/or lighter RAMCloud articles like the position paper for background. We could also link to the SOSP paper, for the students who look at research publicationsFor more information about RAMCloud, you can refer to:
- RAMCloud wiki
- White paper that describes the motivation for RAMCloud and introduces some of the research issues we are addressing
- The paper on Fast Crash Recovery in RAMCloud that appeared in SOSP 2011.