Introduction to the Special Issue on ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR) 2018

This issue of ACM Transactions on Storage brings some of the highlights of the 11th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR’18), held in Haifa, Israel, during June 2018. SYSTOR is an international forum for interaction across the systems research community, attracting authors and participants from all over the world. Of the 44 submitted and 10 accepted papers, we invited the authors of two notable papers to extend them for publication in this special issue. The first article, which was selected as the best paper at the conference, “Lerna: Parallelizing Dependent Loops Using Speculation,” by Mohamed M. Saad, Roberto Palmieri, and Binoy Ravindran, presents a technique for using speculation to parallelize code containing data dependencies. Lerna uses a combination of static analysis and profiling to rewrite a sequential program into a parallel one and manages the concurrent execution of jobs using transactional memory. This is the first framework for executing such process automatically, without any input from the programmers. The second article, “REGISTOR: A Platform for Unstructured Data Processing Inside SSD Storage,” by Shuyi Pei, Jing Yang, and Qing Yang, presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an in-device regular-expression engine for SSDs. The resulting smart storage avoids transfer of data through the low-bandwidth I/O bus, increasing the application-perceived throughput by up to 10×. This is a significant step toward addressing the challenges of the Big Data era.