The Disk is Dead! Long Live the Disk!

Recent declines in RAM prices have made it reasonable to discuss
replacing disks with battery-backed RAM as the primary persistent
storage medium in desktop computers. RAM has already taken over in
some areas (such as PDAs), but disk is still the only reasonable
choice for most large-scale applications. In this talk, I will
describe Conquest, a hybrid disk/RAM filesystem that combines the best
of each medium while providing a transition path toward the day when
disks can be discarded. Surprisingly, Conquest outperforms disk-only
filesystems in its disk mode, RAM-only filesystems in its RAM mode,
and cache-backed filesystems in any mode.

Geoffrey H. Kuenning is an assistant professor of computer science at
Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. His research interests
include file systems, distributed computing, and performance analysis.
He received his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Michigan State
University, and his Ph.D. from UCLA. He is the author of the Seer
automated hoarding system, the Cheap Rumor replicated file system, and
the popular ispell spelling checker.