Abstract

Abstract: The demand for long-term data storage is reaching unprecedented levels, which requires a fundamental re-thinking of how we build large-scale storage systems, as well as the underlying storage technologies that underpin them. In Project Silica at Microsoft Research we are developing the first-ever storage technology designed and built from the media up for the cloud. We leverage recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics to store data in quartz glass and use powerful machine learning to read the data back. In this talk, I will describe how we use optics to store data inside glass, and how we challenge the traditional storage systems design to build the future hardware and software infrastructure for the cloud.

Bio: Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou is a Senior Researcher in the Cloud Infrastructure group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Her research interests include storage and data center systems. She received her PhD in 2015 from the University of Ioannina in Greece, focusing on improving the data durability, resource efficiency and performance in local and distributed filesystems.