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!