Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Computer Science and Engineering

The Internet age has exponentially increased the volume of digital media that is being shared and distributed. Broadband Internet has made technologies such as high quality streaming video on demand possible. Large scale supercomputers also consume and create huge quantities of data. This media and data must be stored, cataloged and retrieved with high-performance. Researching high-performance storage subsystems to meet the I/O demands of applications in modern scenarios is crucial. Advances in microprocessor technology have given rise to relatively cheap off-the-shelf hardware that may be put together as personal computers as well as servers. The servers may be connected together by networking technology to create farms or clusters of workstations (COW). The evolution of COWs has significantly reduced the cost of ownership of high-performance clusters and has allowed users to build fairly large scale machines based on commodity server hardware. As COWs have evolved, networking technologies like InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet have also evolved. These networking technologies not only give lower end-to-end latencies, but also allow for better messaging throughput between the nodes. This allows us to connect the clusters with high-performance interconnects at a relatively lower cost. With the deployment of low-cost, high-performance hardware and networking technology, it is increasingly becoming important to design a storage system that can be shared across all the nodes in the cluster. Traditionally, the different components of the file system have been stringed together using network connections. The protocol generally used over the network is TCP/IP. The TCP/IP protocol stack in general has been shown to have poor performance especially for high-performance networks. In this dissertation, we research the problem of designing high-performance communication subsystems for network attached storage (NAS) systems. Specifically, we delve i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Panda Dhabaleswar PhD (Advisor); Ponnuswammy Sadayappan PhD (Committee Member); Feng Qin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2003, Technical and Scientific Communication

In January of 2000, I accepted a full-time position with Dell Inc. (formerly known as Dell Computer Corporation) located in Austin, Texas. This report describes the first 18-months of my tenure at Dell and focuses on a major project I completed during this time. I began this project in January 2001 and completed it in March 2001. The other chapters in this report provide a description of Dell Inc., an overview of my internship and my major and minor writing projects, an analysis of the problem-solving model, and some examples of the technical writing assignments that I developed at Dell.

Committee: Jean Lutz (Advisor) Subjects: Computer Science