CIDR 2009 Best Paper Award Presentation

by Anastasia Ailamaki


On behalf of the awards committee I would first like to congratulate
all the authors for their excellent submissions to this year's CIDR
proceedings track. You have made our job very very hard :)

This year's CIDR best paper award goes to
"uFLIP: Understanding Flash IO Patterns"

by Luc Bouganim from INRIA 
Bjorn Tor Jonsson from Reykjavik University
and Philippe Bonnet from the University of Copenhagen

As we heard from Luc yesterday after lunch, the advent of flash
devices constitute a radical change for secondary storage, to which
database systems must adapt. However, this is not simple because the
characteristics of flash devices call for different techniques to
ensure optimized, seamless I/O.  The paper introduces a simple yet
complete and powerful benchmarking methodology to quantify the
performance of flash I/O patterns. After measuring several flash
devices, the authors derive a set of design hints that should drive
the development of flash-based systems on current devices.

The paper's impact is high as flash memory is becoming a popular
technology, and offers the DB audience a hands-on introduction to
flash memory from a very practical perspective. The comparison of
flash to regular drives is methodical and intuitive and the authors
outline the "todo" and "not to do" when designing I/O techniques
closely to the system designer. The paper fits squarely into CIDR's
objectives as it has a scientific but also an admirably strong
practical side, and it opens avenues for future research work in
database systems.

Please join me in congratulating Luc, Bjorn, and Philippe for their
excellent work!