Data Storage Research Vision 2025: Report on NSF Visioning Workshop held May 30--June 1, 2018
George Amvrosiadis, Ali Raza Butt, Vasily Tarasov, Erez Zadok, Ming Xin Zhao, Irfan Ahmad, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Feng Chen, Yiran Chen, Yong Chen, Yue Cheng, Vijay Chidambaram, Dilma Da Silva, Angela Demke-Brown, Peter J. Desnoyers, Jason Flinn, Xubin He, Song Jiang, Geoff Kuenning, Min Li · 2018
With the emergence of new computing paradigms (e.g., cloud and edge computing, big data, Internet of Things (IoT), deep learning, etc.) and new storage hardware (e.g., non-volatile memory (NVM), shingled-magnetic recording (SMR) disks, and kinetic drives, etc.), a number of open challenges and research issues need to be addressed to ensure sustained storage systems efficacy and performance. The wide variety of applications demand that the fundamental design of storage systems should be revisited to support application-specific and application-defined semantics. Existing standards and abstractions need to be reevaluated; new sustainable data representations need to be designed to support emerging applications. To take advantage of hardware advancements, new storage software designs are also necessary in order to maximize overall system efficiency and performance. Therefore, there is a urgent need for a consolidated effort to identify and establish a vision for storage systems research and comprehensive techniques that provide practical solutions to the storage issues facing the information technology community. To address this need, the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Visioning Workshop on Data Storage Research 2025 brought together a number of storage researchers from academia, industry, national laboratories, and federal agencies to develop a collective vision for future storage research, as well as to prioritize near-term and long-term storage research and scientific investigations. In-depth discussions were carried out at the workshop along four major themes: (1) Storage for Cloud, Edge, and IoT Systems; (2) AI and Storage; (3) Rethinking Storage Systems Design; and (4) Evolution of Storage Systems with Emerging Hardware. The participants especially underscored the need for focused educational and training activities to instill storage system tools and technologies in the next generation of researchers and IT practitioners. Finally, the development of shared, scalable, and flexible community infrastructure to enable and sustain innovative storage research and verifiable evaluation was also discussed. This report presents the findings from these discussions.