Erik Riedel

Alumnus, Ph.D. Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University

Research

What I'm currently doing
- Moving the family to Boston to start work with EMC's cloud storage group in Cambridge.
- Trying to decide what to do now that Seagate is closing the Pittsburgh facility.
- Elected to the SNIA Technical Council, helping to define and promote industry-wide standards and architectures.
- Leading the SNIA Green Storage TWG to define metrics for measuring and comparing energy efficiency of storage systems, including input to the EPA ENERGY STAR program for storage.
- Part of the technical advisory board for The Technology Collaborative (formerly Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse) supporting startups and university technology transfer projects in the state of Pennsylvania.
- Came back to Pittsburgh to set up a storage systems group within Seagate Research at a facility downtown.
What I did before that
- Served as program co-chair for the 6th Annual USENIX FAST conference on file and storage technology.
- Leading a standards group helping to define a new storage interface called OSD that was approved in 2004 by the ANSI T10 committee on it's way to becoming an international standard. Details of the work are available in a Seagate white paper and a tutorial from the SNIA
- Continued my adventures in storage at Hewlett-Packard Labs in sunny California
What I did while a student at Carnegie Mellon
- Finished my dissertation (!) on Active Disks which helped inspire a commercial product from Netezza (their overview, their patent)
- Worked on numerous other parts of the Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) project which became ANSI T10 OSD
- Design of Network-Attached Storage with the NSIC/NASD industry consortium
- I/O Intensive Applications as part of the Parallel Data Laboratory
- Parallel File Systems as part of the Scalable I/O Initiative
Where I spent my summers
- Studying high-performance I/O in Windows NT at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center
- Seismic Acquisition and Processing at Schlumberger Oilfield Services
What I did before I became an I/O guy
- Geographic Environmental Modeling System (GEMS) for NSF Grand Challenge Program
- Comprehensive Modeling System (CMS) for CAMRAQ with EPRI's Environmental Group
- Models-3 with the EPA/NOAA Atmospheric Sciences Division
Random bits of information
- Briefly researched the Birthday of the Web during a workshop to help the Library of Congress preserve digital data
- Found an interesting study of development activity in Pittsburgh's Strip District done by some CMU grad students
- List of my granted patents and published patent applications
- Tried to create a hello, world application for the grid after a panel session challenge at OSDI 2004

Real Life

Gone too soon
- On 14 March 2008, a group of shocked friends and family buried our great friend Howard in Florida.
- Since January 2007, a large group of family, friends and colleagues have been missing Jim, a great mind and trusted advisor.
Emigration course - life after grad school
- Howard Gobioff and I gave an emigration course in 2003 on life after grad school.
- Very similar (with some changes as our employers have grown/shrunk) to one we gave in 2001.

Publications

Ningfang Mi, Alma Riska, Xin Li, Evgenia Smirni and Erik Riedel “Restraint Utilization of Idleness for Transparent Scheduling of Background Tasks” to appear in ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance. Seattle, WA. June 2009.
Ningfang Mi, Alma Riska, Evgenia Smirni and Erik Riedel “Enhancing data availability in disk drives through background jobs” Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). Anchorage, AK. June 2008.
Alma Riska and Erik Riedel “Idle Read After Write - IRAW” USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Boston, MA. June 2008.
David Nagle, Michael Factor, Sami Iren, Dalit Naor, Erik Riedel, Ohad Rodeh and Julian Satran “The ANSI T10 object-based storage standard and current implementations” IBM Journal of Research and Development 52 (4/5). July/September 2008.
Alma Riska, James Larkby-Lahet and Erik Riedel “Evaluating Block-level Optimization Through the IO Path” USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Santa Clara, CA. June 2007.
Alma Riska and Erik Riedel “Long-range dependence at the disk drive level” 3rd International QEST Conference. Riverside, CA. September 2006.
Jianyong Zhang, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Qian Wang, Alma Riska, Erik Riedel “Storage performance virtualization via throughput and latency control” ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS). ACM Press. New York, NY. August 2006.
Qi Zhang, Alma Riska, Erik Riedel, Ningfang Mi, Evgenia Smirni. “Evaluating performability of systems with background jobs” Proceedings of the Performance and Dependability Symposium (DSN/PDS). Philadelphia, PA. June 2006.
Alma Riska, Erik Riedel. “Disk Drive Level Workload Characterization” Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Boston, MA. June 2006.
Jianyong Zhang, Alma Riska, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Qian Wang, Erik Riedel “Storage Performance Virtualization via Throughput and Latency Control” 13th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS). Atlanta, GA. September 2005.
Qi Zhang, Alma Riska, Erik Riedel “Workload Propagation - Overload in bursty servers” 2nd International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST). Torino, Italy. September 2005.
Jianyong Zhang, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Alma Riska, Qian Wang, Erik Riedel “An Interposed 2-Level I/O Scheduling Framework for Performance Virtualization” ACM SIGMETRICS, extended abstract. Banff, Canada. June 2005.
Qi Zhang, Alma Riska, Evgenia Smirni, Erik Riedel “Bottleneck Identification in E-commerce Systems” 9th International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW). Beijing, China. October 2004.
Alma Riska, Erik Riedel, Sami Iren “Adaptive disk scheduling for overload management” 1st International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST). Enschede, The Netherlands. September 2004.
Larry Huston, Rahul Sukthankar, Rajiv Wickremesinghe, M. Satyanarayanan, Gregory R. Ganger, Erik Riedel, Anastassia Ailamaki “Diamond: A Storage Architecture for Early Discard in Interactive Search” 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). San Francisco, CA. March 2004.
Alma Riska, Erik Riedel “It's Not Fair - Evaluating Efficient Disk Scheduling” 11th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Similation of Computer Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS). Orlando, FL. October 2003.
Mike Mesnier, Gregory R. Ganger, Erik Riedel “Object-Based Storage” IEEE Communications Magazine 41 (8). August 2003.
Alma Riska, Erik Riedel, Sami Iren “Managing Overload Via Adaptive Scheduling” 1st Workshop on Algorithms and Architecture for Self-Managing Systems. San Diego, CA. June 2003.
Erik Riedel “Storage Systems: Not Just a Bunch of Disks Anymore” ACM Queue 1 (4). June 2003.
David Anderson, James Dykes, Erik Riedel “SCSI vs. ATA - More than an interface” 2nd Conference on File and Storage Technology (FAST). San Francisco, CA. April 2003.
Mahesh Kallahalla, Erik Riedel, Ram Swaminathan, Qian Wang, Kevin Fu “Plutus: Scalable secure file sharing on untrusted storage” 2nd Conference on File and Storage Technology (FAST). San Francisco, CA. April 2003.
Erik Riedel, Mahesh Kallahalla, Ram Swaminathan “A framework for evaluating storage system security” 1st Conference on File and Storage Technology (FAST). Monterey, CA. January 2002.
Erik Riedel, Christos Faloutsos, Garth A. Gibson, David Nagle “Active Disks for Large-Scale Data Processing” IEEE Computer. June 2001.
Erik Riedel, Susan Spence, Alistair Veitch “When local becomes global: an application study of data consistency in a networked world” 20th IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC). Phoenix, AZ. April 2001.
Christopher R. Lumb, Jiri Schindler, Gregory R. Ganger, David F. Nagle and Erik Riedel “Towards Higher Disk Head Utilization: Extracting Free Bandwidth From Busy Disk Drives” 4th Sympsosium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). San Diego, CA. October 2000.
Erik Riedel, Christos Faloutsos, Gregory R. Ganger, David F. Nagle “Data Mining on an OLTP System (Nearly) For Free” 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. Dallas, TX. May 2000.
Erik Riedel, Christos Faloutsos, David Nagle “Active Disk Architecture for Databases” Technical Report, CMU-CS-00-145. April 2000.
Erik Riedel “Active Disks - Remote Execution for Network-Attached Storage” Doctoral Dissertation, CMU-CS-99-177. Pittsburgh, PA. November 1999.
Erik Riedel, Garth Gibson, Christos Faloutsos, “Active Storage For Large-Scale Data Mining and Multimedia” 24th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB '98). New York, NY. August 1998.
Erik Riedel, Catharine van Ingen, Jim Gray, “A Performance Study of Sequential I/O on Windows NT” 2nd USENIX Windows NT Symposium. Seattle, WA. August 1998. Best Student Paper.
Erik Riedel, Garth Gibson, “Active Disks - Remote Execution for Network-Attached Storage” Technical Report, CMU-CS-97-198. December 1997.
Garth Gibson, David Nagle, Khalil Amiri, Jeff Butler, Fay Chang, Howard Gobioff, Charles Hardin, Erik Riedel, David Rochberg, Jim Zelenka, “A Cost-Effective, High-Bandwidth Storage Architecture” Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS VIII). San Jose, CA. October 1998.
Garth Gibson, David Nagle, Khalil Amiri, Fay Chang, Howard Gobioff, Erik Riedel, David Rochberg, Jim Zelenka, “Filesystems for Network-Attached Secure Disks” Technical Report, CMU-CS-97-118. July 1997.
Garth Gibson, David Nagle, Khalil Amiri, Fay Chang, Eugene Feinberg, Howard Gobioff, Chen Lee, Berend Ozceri, Erik Riedel, David Rochberg, Jim Zelenka, “File Server Scaling With Network-Attached Secure Disks” ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS '97). Seattle, WA. June 1997.
Erik Riedel and Garth Gibson, “Understanding Customer Dissatisfaction With Underutilized Distributed File Servers” 5th NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies. College Park, MD. September 1996.
Peter Corbett, Jean-Pierre Prost, Chris Demetriou, Garth Gibson, Erik Riedel, Jim Zelenka, Yuqun Chen, Ed Felten, Kai Li, John Hartman, Larry Peterson, Brian Bershad, Alec Wolman, Ruth Aydt, “Proposal for a Common Parallel File System Programming Interface” Technical Report CMU-CS-96-193. Presented at the International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (Supercomputing '96). Pittsburgh, PA. November 1996.
Erik Riedel, Bernd Bruegge, Armistead G. Russell and Gregory J. McRae, “Developing GEMS: An Environmental Modeling System” IEEE Computational Science and Engineering. Volume 2, Number 3, pp. 55-68, Fall 1995.
Erik Riedel and Bernd Bruegge, “GEMS: Towards an Object-Oriented Framework” 8th Annual European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP '94). Bologna, Italy. July 1994.

More Information and CV

Background information in my curriculum vitae (pdf)
Or, the short version as a speaker's bio

Mailing Address: Seagate Research; 1251 Waterfront Place; Pittsburgh, PA 15222

riedel {at} cmu {dot} edu (last updated 9 June 2009)