Memory's vulnerability to system crashes lowers performance and reliability in current computer systems. In this talk, I describe how to create an area of main memory (the Rio file cache) that is as safe as disk from operating system crashes. I then describe two systems (Vista and Discount Checking) that use this reliable main memory to improve performance and reliability. Vista is a transactional memory that is customized for Rio. Because it is tailored for reliable memory, it can perform atomic, durable transactions in a few microseconds. Discount Checking is a checkpointing library that uses the fast transactions provided by Vista. By linking with the Discount Checking library, an application becomes recoverable with few source code changes and little run-time overhead.

 The Seminar will be on November 19, 1999, at 14:40

Bio: Peter M. Chen received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1987 and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and 1992.

He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His research interests include operating systems, databases, and distributed systems and focus on improving the performance and reliability of computer storage systems.