Center for Magnetic Recording Research

Research Interests

The Non-volatile Systems Laboratory

Hardware/software interactions, applications and architectures for non-volatile solid-state memories, ultra-efficient specialized computing architectures, architectures for data-centric computing, and software optimizations for multi-core processors.

Steven Swanson's research focuses on understanding the implications of emerging technology trends on computing systems. He leads the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory (NVSL, http://nvsl.ucsd.edu), where he oversees a wide range of projects related to non-volatile memories, how computer systems can leverage them to increase performance and efficiency, and other system-level issues they raise (e.g., in security). He also co-leads the GreenDroid project (http://greendroid.ucsd.edu). The GreenDroid team is building a prototype processor that includes ultra-efficient co-processors for key portions of the Android smart phone operating system. All these projects focus on building prototype systems that must deal with hardware, software, and the boundary between them.

Biography

Steven Swanson is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and the director of the Non-volatile Systems Laboratory. His research interests include the systems, architecture, security, and reliability issues surrounding non-volatile, solid-state memories. He also co-leads projects to develop low-power co-processors for irregular, mobile applications (e.g., Android Apps) and to devise software techniques for using multiple processors to speed up single-threaded computations. In previous lives he has also worked on scalable dataflow architectures, ubiquitous computing, and simultaneous multithreading. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2006.

Publications

CMRR Related Publications

"Providing Safe, User Space Access to Fast, Solid State Disks," Adrian M. Caulfield, Todor I. Mollov, Louis Eisner, Arup De, Joel Coburn, and Steven Swanson, to appear in ASPLOS '12: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, New York, NY, USA, March 2012.

"Characterization and Error-Correcting Codes for TLC Flash Memories," Eitan Yaakobi, Laura Grupp, Paul H. Siegel, Steven Swanson, and Jack K. Wolf, to Appear in International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications, Data Storage Technology and Applications Symposium, 2012.

"Tackling Temporal Variability in Multilevel Flash: New Error-Control Code Design and Architectural Validation," Ryan Gabrys, Laura Grupp, Steven Swanson, and Lara Dolecek, To appear in Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Allerton Conference.

"Onyx: A Protoype Phase-Change Memory Storage Array," Ameen Akel, Adrian M. Caulfield, Todor I. Mollov, Rajesh K. Gupta, and Steven Swanson, Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX conference on Hot topics in storage and file systems, 2011, pages 1-5

"Extracting Device Fingerprints from Flash Memory by Exploiting Physical Variations," Pravin Prabhu, Ameen Akel, Laura Grupp, Wing-Key Yu, G. Edward Suh, Edwin Kan, and Steven Swanson, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Trust and Trustworthy Computing, 2011, pages 1-17

"Understanding the Impact of Power Loss on Flash Memory," Hung-Wei Tseng, Laura M. Grupp, and Steven Swanson, 48th Design Automation Conference (DAC 2011), June 2011, pages 1-6.

"Reliably Erasing Data from Flash-Based Solid State Drives," Michael Wei, Laura M. Grupp, Frederick E. Spada, and Steven Swanson, To Appear: 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '11), 2011.

"NV-Heaps: Making Persistent Objects Fast and Safe with Next-Generation, Non-Volatile Memories," Joel Coburn, Adrian M. Caulfield, Ameen Akel, Laura M. Grupp, Rajesh K. Gupta, Ranjit Jhala, and Steven Swanson, To Appear: ASPLOS '11: Proceeding of the 16th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, 2011.

"Moneta: A High-performance Storage Array Architecture for Next-generation, Non-volatile Memories," Adrian M. Caulfield, Arup De, Joel Coburn, Todor Mollov, Rajesh Gupta, and Steven Swanson, Proceedings of The 43rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2010.

"Understanding the Impact of Emerging Non-Volatile Memories on High-Performance, IO-Intensive Computing," Adrian M. Caulfield, Joel Coburn, Todor Mollov, Arup De, Ameen Akel, Jiahua He, Arun Jagatheesan, Rajesh K. Gupta, Allan Snavely, and Steven Swanson, To appear in Supercomputing, 2010. (Nominated for for best technical paper and best student paper).

"Rethinking Flash in the Data Center," David G. Anderson and Steven Swanson, IEEE Micro, July/August 2010.

"Gordon: using flash memory to build fast, power-efficient clusters for data-intensive applications," Adrian M. Caulfield, Laura M. Grupp, and Steven Swanson, ASPLOS '09: Proceeding of the 14th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, New York, NY, USA, 2009, pages 217-228.

"BlueSSD: An Open Platform for Cross-layer Experiments for NAND Flash-based SSDs," Sungjin Lee, Kermin Fleming, Jihoon Park, Keonsoo Ha, Adrian M. Caulfield, Steven Swanson, Arvind, and Jihong Kim, The 5th Workshop on Architectural Research Prototyping, 2010.

"Error Characterization and Coding Schemes for Flash Memories," Eitan Yaakobi, Paul H. Siegel, Steven Swanson, Jack Wolf, Laura Grupp, and Jing Ma, IEEE Globecom 2010 Workshop on Application of Communication Theory to Emerging Memory Technologies (ACTEMT 2010), Miami, Florida, USA.

"Beyond the Datasheet: Using Test Beds to Probe Non-Volatile Memories' Dark Secrets," Laura Grupp, Adrian M. Caulfield, Joel Coburn, John Davis, and Steven Swanson, IEEE Globecom 2010 Workshop on Application of Communication Theory to Emerging Memory Technologies (ACTEMT 2010), Miami, Florida, USA.

"Characterizing Flash Memory: Anomalies, Observations, and Applications," Laura M. Grupp, Adrian M. Caulfield, Joel Coburn, Eitan Yaakobi, Steven Swanson, Paul Siegel, and Jack Wolf, MICRO '09: Proceedings of the 42nd International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2009.

"Gordon: An Improved Architecture for Data-Intensive Applications," Adrian M. Caulfield, Laura M. Grupp, and Steven Swanson, IEEE Micro 30:121-130, 2010. (IEEE Micro Top Picks).

Graduate Students:

• Ameen Akel
• Adrian Caulfield
• Joel Coburn
• Arup De
• Laura Grupp
• Todor Mollov
• Hung Wei Tseng
• Michael Wei
• Pravin Prabhu
• Alex Eisner
• Sundaram Bhaskaran
• Trevor Bunker