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