Parallel Data Laboratory (PDL) Talk - Sara McAllister June 5, 2025 12:00pm — 1:00pm Location: Virtual Presentation - ET - Remote Access - Zoom Speaker: SARA McALLISTER , Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University https://saramcallister.github.io/ Taking off the compute-colored glasses: Storage is vital to datacenter sustainability By 2050, datacenters are expected to account for over 20% of global carbon emissions. Most of the emissions will be embodied (from manufacturing, transporting, and disposing of datacenter hardware). Unfortunately, the vast majority of research on reducing datacenter embodied emissions focuses on compute, even though the majority come from storage. My research starts to remedy this gap through rethinking storage system design to greatly reduce embodied emissions. In this talk, I will first introduce how IO bottlenecks limit storage's sustainability. I will then present how my projects, Kangaroo and FairyWREN, show that overcoming flash's write limitations enables near-optimal emissions for flash caching. Finally, I will discuss how to curb hard disk drive's IO bottlenecks with Declarative IO to enable desner, lower emissions drives in bulk storage. — Sara McAllister is a final-year PhD student at CMU, working with Nathan Beckmann and Greg Ganger. She researches how to create more sustainable datacenters, particularly for caching and storage systems. Her work includes a focus on improving efficiency and sustainability through hardware‑software co‑design and grounding design choices in mathematical modeling. Her work has appeared at OSDI, SOSP, and ICML, including receiving a Best Paper Award at SOSP 2021. She is a 2021 NDSEG fellow, a 2023 EECS Rising Star, and a 2025 Siebel Scholar.Zoom Participation. See announcement. Event Website: https://pdl.cmu.edu/talk-series/index.shtml Add event to Google Add event to iCal
