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Research Overview

A summary of my work within the storage field, including an overview of the BetrFS project trajectory. If you are a Williams student and you would like to work together, or if you are just interested in some context for my work, this is a good place to start. Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions!

BetrFS

• Project homepage with details about the research, a technical FAQ, and a quickstart guide.


• BetrFS source code, hosted on github.

Publications

• BetrFS: a Compleat File System for Commodity SSDs. Yizheng Jiao, Simon Berton, Sagar Patel, Luke Zeller, Rory Bennett, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Michael A. Bender, Michael Condict, Alexander Conway, Martin Farach-Colton, Xiongzi Ge, William Jannen, Rob Johnson. Donald E. Porter, and Jun Yuan. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems, [ACM]


• External-memory dictionaries in the affine and PDAM models. Michael A. Bender, Alexander Conway, Martin Farach-Colton. William Jannen, Yizheng Jiao, Rob Johnson. Eric Knorr, Sara McAllister, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Prashant Pandey, Donald E. Porter, Jun Yuan, and Yang Zhan. ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing. [ACM].


• Copy-on-abundant-write for nimble file system clones. Yang Zhan, Alexander Conway, Yizheng Jiao, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Ian Groombridge, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, William Jannen, Rob Johnson. Donald E. Porter, and Jun Yuan. ACM Transactions on Storage. [ACM]


• Infrastructor: Flexible, No-Infrastructure Tools for Scaling CS. Dan Barowy, William Jannen. Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. [ACM].


• How to Copy Files. Yang Zhan, p Alexander Conway, Yizheng Jiao, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Ian Groombridge, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, William Jannen, Rob Johnson. Donald E. Porter, and Jun Yuan. 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 20). [USENIX]


• Filesystem Aging: It’s more Usage than Fullness. Alexander Conway, Eric Knorr, Yizheng Jiao, Michael A. Bender, William Jannen, Rob Johnson, Donald E. Porter, Martin Farach-Colton. 11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage 19). [USENIX]


• The Dictionary Problem, Optimal Searching, and Asymptotic Distortions of the DAM Model. Michael A. Bender, Alexander Conway, Martin Farach-Colton. William Jannen, Yizheng Jiao, Rob Johnson. Eric Knorr, Sara McAllister, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Prashant Pandey, Donald E. Porter, Jun Yuan, and Yang Zhan. 31st ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 19). [PDF].


• Efficient Directory Mutations in a Full-Path-Indexed File System. Yang Zhan, Yizheng Jiao, Donald E. Porter, Alexander Conway, Eric Knorr, Martin Farach-Colton. Michael A. Bender, Jun Yuan, William Jannen, Rob Johnson. ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 14, Issue 3, Article 22, November 2018. [ACM Download]


• The Full Path to Full Path Indexing. Yang Zhan, Alexander Conway, Yizheng Jiao, Eric Knorr, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton. William Jannen, Rob Johnson, Donald E. Porter, and Jun Yuan, Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '18), Oakland, CA, February 2018. [USENIX]. Nominated for Best Paper.


• How to Age Your File System. Alexander Conway, Ainesh Bakshi, Yizheng Jiao, Yang Zhan, Michael A. Bender, William Jannen, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Donald E. Porter, Jun Yuan, and Martin Farach-Colton. ;login: magazine, 42(2): 6-11, Summer 2017. [;login:] [pdf]


• Writes Wrought Right, and Other Adventures in File System Optimization. Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan, William Jannen, Prashant Pandey, Amogh Akshintala, Kanchan Chandnani, Pooja Deo, Zardosht Kasheff, Leif Walsh, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, and Donald E. Porter. ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 13, Issue 1, March 2017. [ACM Download]


• File Systems Fated for Senescence? Nonsense, Says Science! Alexander Conway, Ainesh Bakshi, Yizheng Jiao, William Jannen, Yang Zhan, Jun Yuan, Michael A. Bender, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Donald E. Porter, and Martin Farach-Colton. Proceedings of the 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '17), Santa Clara, CA, February 2017. [USENIX]


• Lazy Analytics: Let Other Queries Do the Work For You. William Jannen, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, and Donald E. Porter. Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage '16), Denver, CO, June 2016. [USENIX][preprint].


• Optimizing Every Operation in a Write-optimized File System. Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan, William Jannen, Prashant Pandey, Amogh Akshintala, Kanchan Chandnani, Pooja Deo, Zardosht Kasheff, Leif Walsh, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, and Donald E. Porter. Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '16), Santa Clara, CA, February 2016. [USENIX]. Awarded Best Paper.


• An Introduction to Bε-Trees and Write-Optimization Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, William Jannen, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Donald E. Porter, Jun Yuan, and Yang Zhan. ;login: magazine, 40(5): 22-28, October 2015. [;login:] [pdf]


• BetrFS: Write-Optimization in a Kernel File System. William Jannen, Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan, Amogh Akshintala, John Esmet, Yizheng Jiao, Ankur Mittal, Prashant Pandey, Phaneendra Reddy, Leif Walsh, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, and Donald E. Porter. ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) - Special Issue USENIX FAST 2015, 2015. [ACM Download]


• Moving Toward Lucha and Liberación. Cata Mariaelena Elisabeth, Silvia Juliana Mantilla Ortiz, and Bill Jannen. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. 2015 Aug; 12(2):152-3. [link]


• Visualizing RNA Secondary Structure Base Pair Probabilities. William K. Jannen and Daniel P. Aalberts. 5th Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (biovis '15), Design Contest Honorable Mention. [PDF]


• BetrFS: A Right-Optimized Write-Optimized File System. William Jannen, Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan, Amogh Akshintala, John Esmet, Yizheng Jiao, Ankur Mittal, Prashant Pandey, Phaneendra Reddy, Leif Walsh, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, and Donald E. Porter. Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '15), Santa Clara, CA, February 2015. [USENIX]. Nominated for Best Paper.


• Cooperation and Security Isolation of Library OSes for Multi-Process Applications. Chia-Che Tsai, Kumar Saurabh Arora, Nehal Bandi, Bhushan Jain, William Jannen, Jitin John, Harry A Kalodner, Vrushali Kulkarni, Daniela Oliveira, and Donald E. Porter. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '14), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 2014. [ACM Download]


• Modeling Unpairing Costs for Fast Computation of the Net Binding Free Energy of an Oligo to an mRNA Target. Julian M. Hess, William K. Jannen, Daniel P. Aalberts. Biophysical Journal 106 (2), 285a. [link]


• Virtualize Storage, Not Disks, William Jannen, Chia-Che Tsai, and Donald E. Porter. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS '13), Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, May 2013. [PDF] [USENIX]


• Visualizing RNA base pairing probabilities with RNAbow diagrams, Daniel P. Aalberts and William K. Jannen. RNA. 2013 Apr; 19(4):475-8. [PDF] [PubMed] [Use the tool]