Kang G. Shin and Collaborators Win Best Paper Award at IEEE ICAC Conference

Professor Kang G. Shin and five collaborators have won the Best Paper Award from the 8th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing, which took place June 14 – 18, 2011, in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The paper, entitled “Maestro: Quality-of-Service in Large Disk Arrays,” addresses the challenge of provisioning storage resources in disk arrays. It introduces, Maestro, a feedback controller that can manage resources on large disk arrays to provide performance differentiation among multiple applications. Maestro monitors the performance of each application and dynamically allocates array resources to applications so that diverse performance requirements can be met without static partitioning. It supports multiple performance metrics (e.g., latency and throughput) and application priorities so that important applications receive better performance in case of resource contention. By ensuring that high-priority applications sharing storage with other applications obtain the performance levels they require, Maestro makes it possible to use storage resources efficiently. The authors evaluate Maestro using both synthetic and real-world workloads on a large, commercial disk array, demonstrating that Maestro can reliably adjust the allocation of disk array resources to achieve application performance targets.

Prof. Shin is the Kevin and Nancy O’Connor Professor of Computer Science, and is the Founding Director of the Real-Time Computing Laboratory (RTCL) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at The University of Michigan. His current research focuses on computing systems and networks as well as on embedded realtime and cyber-physical systems, all with emphasis on timeliness, security, and dependability. He has supervised the completion of 68 PhDs, authored/coauthored more than 760 technical articles and more than 20 patents. He has co-authored (with C. M. Krishna) a textbook, “Real-Time Systems,” McGraw Hill, 1997. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM, and an overseas member of the Korean Academy of Engineering.