Data, Data, Everywhere; How to Get What You Want?

Digital Technology Center Intelligent Storage Consortium

and

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN 55455

Monday, May 21, 2007
Talk: 10:00 am - 11:00 am
3105 Engineering

Host: Richard Enbody

The rapid development of Internet, the fast dropping of storage cost and the great improvement of storage capacity have created an environment with enormous amounts of data. How to get the data we want and how to mange these huge volumes of data become great challenges. It is generally agreed that we are more interested in the information represented by data instead of the data itself. Therefore, it is important to be able to store the semantic of the data together with the data. A semantic-based query can be answered by retrieving the relevant data no matter where it is. Recent developments in MPEG-21 by the multimedia community and Semantic-Web by Internet community are some examples of this. In order to respond to these challenges, we believe today's storage systems need to be fundamentally changed. In this talk, we will discuss the possible changes in storage systems and why these changes can create an environment that allow us to locate the desired data and to manage the increasing amount of available data. We will present the intelligence to be included in storage systems and will call this approach "Intelligent Storage." With this intelligence, a new architecture of storage systems can be formed. The possible essential concepts to be parts of the intelligent storage systems include active storage device, object-based storage device, autonomic storage, and application-aware storage. We argue that the Object-based Storage Device (OSD) is the most fundamental concept. We also plan to show a number of challenging applications that can be made easier with the support of OSD-enabled intelligent storage systems.

David H.C. Du is currently a Professor at Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is also serving as a Program Director at National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia. At NSF he is working on both Sensor Network and Cyber Trust (Internet Security) Programs. He has a Ph.D. of computer science from University of Washington, Seattle in 1981.

Research Expertise: Dr. Du has research in multimedia computing, mass storage systems, high-speed networking, high-performance computing, database design, and CAD for VLSI circuits. He has authored and co-authored over 180 technical papers including 85 referred journal publications in these research areas. He has graduated 45 Ph.D. and 80 M.S. students in the last 25 years. His research in multimedia computing and storage systems include video-on-demand server architecture, video and audio synchronization techniques, multimedia storage systems, intelligent storage devices and future storage systems. His research in CAD includes physical layout, timing verification and delay fault testing for high-speed circuits. His research in high-speed networking includes heterogeneous high-performance computing over high-speed networks, quality of service, high-performance computing over a cluster of workstations and PCs, optical networks and sensor networks.

Professional Activities and Awards: Dr. Du is an IEEE Fellow and a Fellow of the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute. He was the US WEST Chair Professor at the University of Minnesota from 1994 to 2000. He is currently serving on the Editorial Boards of a number of journals. He has also served as Conference Chair and Program Committee Chair for several conferences in the multimedia and database areas. He has had research grants from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, ONR, DOE and companies like 3M, Northern Telecom, Unisys, IBM, Seagate Technology, US WEST, Honeywell, Sun Micro, LSI Logic, ETRI/Korea, ITRI/Taiwan, Intel, Cisco and etc.

Industrial Experiences: Dr. Du has served as a consultant to a number of companies in the past. In 1996, he spent 6 months in the Computer Communications Lab (CCL) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan. His major function at CCL/ITRI was to plan several long term R&D projects funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In 1998, he joined IXMICRO as the Vice President of Research and Development for one year. He led a team of 30+ engineers to develop products such as ATM Network Interface Cards, ATM Switches, Fast Ethernet Switches, Wireless Mice, ADSL Modems, and Streaming Video Servers. He has co-founded a startup company called Streaming21 and has helped to establish another startup company called Baynacre with some of his former students. Both companies are currently located in San Jose, California. Streaming21 is focused on developing streaming video products for carrier and entertainment markets. Baynacre is focused on static timing analysis software tools for Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI), especially for use with circuit designs based on nanotechnology.