The Future of Hard Disk Technology: Dead or Alive?

Time：2018/04/11  15:30~17:30

Place：ED117

Speaker：Ming-Chang Yang

Abstract：

Recently, the traditional Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) have reached their bottleneck in providing higher areal density by continuously shrinking the grain volume, because of the superparamagnetic effect (SPE). To break the maximal areal density (i.e., 1 TB per square inch) of PMR technology, various new magnetic recording storage technologies have been investigated and proposed. Among these emerging technologies, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is the most promising one for being widely commercialized, since it leverages the existing HDD technology and requires no major changes to the disk makeup or disk-head. Although SMR technology enables lower-cost and higher-density HDDs, SMR technology may suffer from poor runtime performance and poor responsiveness problems. This talk will first talk about the advance of HDDs and how the emerging SMR technology can lead HDDs for another success of decades. Then, this talk will demonstrate the potentials of taking advantage of resources or knowledge from the host system, so as to improve the runtime performance or responsiveness for SMR disks. In the end, this talk will also address some important research topics when other emerging non-volatile memory technologies (such as STT-RAM, ReRAM and PCM) are considered.

Speaker Bio：                                                                                          

Ming-Chang Yang is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his B.S. degree in Department of Computer Science from National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2010. He received his Master and Ph.D. degrees in Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2012 and 2016, respectively. From Aug. 2015 to July 2016, he was a visiting scholar in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. From Jan. 2017 to July 2017, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Institute of Information Science (IIS), Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Dr. Yang has published more than thirty research papers in major highly-reputable international journals and conferences. They were mainly published in top journals (e.g., IEEE TC, IEEE TCAD, IEEE TVLSI, and ACM TECS) and top-rated conferences (e.g., ACM/IEEE DAC, ACM/IEEE ICCAD and ACM/IEEE CODES+ISSS). He has also been granted for many scholarships and research awards. He awarded TSIA PhD Student Semiconductor Award from Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA) in 2016, because of his research achievements on flash memory. Dr. Yang also serves as an editor for the transaction, as a program committee member for the international conference, and as a reviewer for premier journals and conferences. His primary research interests including emerging non-volatile memory and storage technologies, memory and storage systems, and the next-generation memory/storage architecture designs.