Abstract: This talk will discuss an approach to systems research based upon an iterative, empirically-driven approach, loosely known as "measure, then build". By first carefully analyzing the state of the art, one can learn what the real problems in today's systems are; by then designing and implementing new systems to solve said problems, one can ensure that one's work is both relevant and important. The talk will draw on examples in research done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison over nearly two decades, including research into Linux file systems, enterprise storage, and (more recently) on modern key-value storage systems such as LevelDB, MongoDB, and other systems.

Short Bio: Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau is a full professor in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, where where he has taught since the beginning of the millennium. He co-leads a group with his wife, Professor Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau; their work focuses on systems (broadly) but with a special emphasis on file and storage systems. They have graduated 20 Ph.D. students in their time at Wisconsin, won 10 best-paper awards in recent years, and some of their innovations, including block-level storage introspection, transactional checksumming, and fast file-system checking, now ship in commercial systems and are used daily by millions of people. Remzi also cares deeply about education, and has won the SACM Student Choice Professor of the Year award four times, the Carolyn Rosner ``Excellent Educator'' award, and the UW-Madison Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award. Chapters from a freely available OS book he and Andrea co-wrote, found at http://www.ostep.org, have been downloaded millions of times in the past few years; the book is in use at hundreds of institutions around the world. Remzi is also an active participant in the systems community, having served on numerous program committees, as well as co-chair of USENIX ATC ’04, FAST ’07, OSDI ’10, and SOCC ’14; Remzi also currently serves as an associate editor for ACM TOCS. Remzi has been a NetApp faculty fellow, an IBM faculty award winner, an NSF CAREER award winner, has consulted for numerous technology companies, and has served on a few advisory boards.