18-746 Storage Systems (Fall 2025): Syllabus

Tentative Schedule

The schedule is also available as an ical file that you can subscribe to.

Lectures and projects can only be accessed by clients with a CMU IP address. CMU students who are off campus can use Cisco AnyConnect VPN to obtain a CMU IP. Most readings require that you have access to ACM or IEEE's digital library. You will automatically have access if you are using a client with a CMU IP.

Lecture Date Lecturer Topics Required readings Optional readings Notes
1 Mon 08/25 Greg Overview and Flash SSD Operation
[pdf]
Syllabus, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch44, Agrawal2008 Hennessy2002, Harchol2000
2 Wed 08/27 Greg Flash SSD Operation and Lab 1 Walkthrough
[pdf]
Agrawal2008 He2017, Mogul2009, McAllister2024 Slides for the myFTL project are available here. Lab 1, Checkpoints 0 and 1 are released.
Mon 09/01 Neither No class (Labor Day)
3 Wed 09/03 George Disk Drive Operation
[pdf]
Ruemmler1994, Worthington1994 Massiglia1986 ch2 1, Massiglia1986 ch2 2, Massiglia1986 ch12, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch37 Read pages 2-1 to 2-20 from Massiglia_ch2_1, 2-38 to 2-52 from Massiglia_ch2_2, and 12-1 to 12-11 from Massiglia_ch12.
4 Mon 09/08 George File System Storage Layout
[pdf]
McKusick1996 ch8, Lee2015 Ren2013, Rodeh2013, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch40, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch43
5 Wed 09/10 George File System Organization
[pdf]
Vahalia1995 ch8 Giampaolo1998 ch2, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch39, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch40
6 Mon 09/15 Greg & George File System Organization (cont'd); Caching and File System Integrity
[pdf]
Ganger2000, Giampaolo1998 ch7 ArpaciDusseau2015 ch42, Fryer2012
7 Wed 09/17 Greg Caching and File System Integrity (cont'd)
Ganger2000, Giampaolo1998 ch7 ArpaciDusseau2015 ch42, Fryer2012
8 Mon 09/22 George Disk Array Organization
[pdf]
Chen1994, Schroeder2007 Schroeder2016, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch38
9 Wed 09/24 George Disk Array Systems
[pdf]
Chen1994, Hetzler2011 Greenan2010, Krioukov2008, Daly1995
10 Mon 09/29 Brian Gold (Founding Engineer / VP, Pure Storage FlashBlade) Scaling all-Flash storage arrays with HW/SW co-design
Wed 10/01 Neither No class
11 Mon 10/06 All Exam 1 Q&A
Wed 10/08 All Exam 1
[pdf]
Exam1 F20 Q, Exam1 F21 Q, Exam1 F22 Q, Exam1 F23 Q, Exam1 F24 Q Exam1 F20 A, Exam1 F21 A, Exam1 F22 A, Exam1 F23 A, Exam1 F24 Q Exam 1 covers all material up to and including the lecture before the exam, including the projects. Try taking the Practice exams without looking at the answers.
Mon 10/13 Neither No class (Fall break)
Wed 10/15 Neither No class (Fall break)
12 Mon 10/20 George Distributed FS and NAS Interfaces
[pdf]
McKusick1996 ch9 Howard1988, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch47, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch48, ArpaciDusseau2015 ch49, RFC1813
13 Wed 10/22 Greg Multi-server Distributed FSes
[pdf]
Ghemawat2003 Kadekodi2020
14 Mon 10/27 Greg Extremely scalable storage
[pdf]
Ghemawat2003 Slides for the CloudFS project are available here.
15 Wed 10/29 Greg Reliability Enhancement Techniques
Holland1994, Welch2008 Kadekodi2022
16 Mon 11/03 Greg Scalable Table Stores
Chang2006 Spanner, Dean2004, Burrows2006
17 Wed 11/05 George Backup and data protection
Keeton2004 Amvrosiadis2016
18 Mon 11/10 Wenguang Wang (Distinguished Engineer, VMware/Broadcom) vSAN, VDFS, and Practical Cache Design in Storage Systems
19 Wed 11/12 George LSM Trees and Applications
LSM-Tree Ren13, Zheng20 From required reading, read Chapters 1, 2, 3.3, and 4
20 Mon 11/17 Larry Greenfield (Distinguished Software Engineer, Storage Group, Google) Evolution of Google FSs
Dean2013
21 Wed 11/19 Matthew Leonard (Head of Compute & Storage Engineering, Bloomberg LP) Software-Defined Storage with Ceph -- From Data Centers to Open Source Innovation
22 Mon 11/24 Jai Menon (Partner, Microsoft Azure; former CTO - IBM and Dell) TBD
Wed 11/26 Neither No class (Thanksgiving)
23 Mon 12/01 TBD TBD
24 Wed 12/03 TBD TBD

Last updated: 2025-10-27 14:02:41 -0400