New Computer Science Research Seminar Series Launches with Talk by CAS Professor Manos Athanassoulis
On Friday, December 11, the Department of Computer Science at BU MET kicked off its new Research Seminar Series with guest Manos Athanassoulis, assistant professor of computer science at BU’s College of Arts & Sciences. Entitled “Delete: The Forgotten Operator,” this virtual seminar was moderated by Kia Teymourian, assistant professor of computer science at BU MET.
Dr. Athanassoulis is founding director of the BU Data-Intensive Systems and Computing Laboratory and co-director of the BU Massive Data Algorithms and Systems Group. His research is in the area of data management focusing on building data systems that efficiently exploit modern hardware (computing units, storage, and memories), are deployed in the cloud, and can adapt to the workload both at setup time and, dynamically, at runtime.
The abstract for “Delete: The Forgotten Operator” is as follows:
When building new data systems, and their underlying storage managers, typically we optimize performance (access time or throughput). However, as data management tasks are increasingly moving to the cloud and refer to massive data sets, a set of other metrics is being considered, including the cost (space amplification, monetary, energy) and the deployment time. In this work we focus on deletion, and we discuss that the typical deletion-through-invalidation approach comes at a cost with respect to space amplification and potentially of the privacy of the users. We focus on the concept of out-of-place deletes, which are frequently employed by storage engines that use the log-structure merge (LSM) tree as their backend.
LSM-Trees support high ingestion rates with low read/write interference. These benefits, however, come at the cost of treating deletes as second-class citizens. A delete inserts a tombstone that invalidates older instances of the deleted key. State-of-the-art LSM engines do not provide guarantees as to how fast a tombstone will propagate to persist the deletion. Further, LSM engines only support deletion on the sort key. To delete on another attribute (e.g., timestamp), the entire tree is read and re-written. In this talk, we present how LSM-Trees work and present a family of new techniques that allow for timely deletion without compromising privacy or space amplification, leading in small read performance benefits and near-zero increase in the amortized write amplification.
More to come—this was the inaugural event of the Research Seminar Series organized by Dr. Teymourian. Stay tuned for future seminars and be sure to sign up!
Archived Computer Science Research Seminars can be found on the Department of Computer Science events web page.