A Foundation for Automated Placement of Data

Abstract

With the increasing complexity of memory and storage, it is important to automate the decision of how to assign data structures to memory and storage devices. On one hand, this requires developing models to reconcile application access patterns against the limited capacity of higher-performance devices. On the other, such a modeling task demands a set of primitives to build from, and a toolkit that implements those primitives in a robust, dynamic fashion. We focus on the latter problem, and to that end we present an interface that abstracts the physical layout of data from the application developer. This will allow developers focused on optimized data place- ment to use our abstracta as the basis for their implementation, while application developers will see a unified, scalable, and resilient memory environment.