Seminar: ceClub: The Technion Computer Engineering Club
How to Cheat in Storage Benchmarking (Without Using AI)
Date:
September,16,2026
Start Time:
11:30 - 12:30
Location:
506, Zisapel Building
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Lecturer:
Erez Zadok
Research Areas:
| Storage, often the slowest component of modern systems, has evolved into a complex and challenging field. Over the years, the storage stack has grown deeper, making it difficult to work on storage systems, which are unforgiving of errors. Therefore, understanding their behavior and performance under various conditions is crucial. This talk delves into my 30-year-long journey in characterizing storage and file system performance, highlighting mistakes made along the way, insights gained from benchmarking, and strategies to optimize storage system performance (hint: “it depends”). Given the ubiquitous nature of stored data, storage researchers have a diverse range of fields and areas to explore. This talk also shows how easy it is to publish misleading or unreproducible results. Finally, while the examples presented focus on storage benchmarking, many of the principles apply to benchmarking any computer system. |
| Erez Zadok is a Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD degree from Columbia University. He directs the File Systems and Storage Lab (FSL) at the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University, where he joined as faculty in 2001. His current research interests include file systems and storage, operating systems, performance and benchmarking, energy efficiency, security and privacy, networking, and applied ML. He received two SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence, the NSF CAREER Award, and several industry awards. Zadok’s funding exceeds $25M and includes federal, state, and industry awards. Zadok published over 150 refereed journal/article papers and one book. Zadok graduated 15 PhDs and over 170 MS students, and has advised over 45 undergraduates. Zadok’s service includes chairing several major conferences (FAST and USENIX ATC) and serving on several steering committees. Zadok is the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS). He is a member of the USENIX, ACM SIGOPS, and IEEE Computer Society.
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