Sriram Sankar

Hardware Engineer,
Microsoft Corporation.
sriram (dot) sankar (at) microsoft (dot) com

Graduate Student,
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia, Charlottesville

Advisor:

Prof. Sudhanva Gurumurthi

I work at Microsoft, designing server and datacenter infrastructure for large scale online services such as Bing. I am also pursuing my PhD at the University of Virginia, working with Prof. Sudhanva Gurumurthi on Datacenter Architectures. I obtained my Bachelors in Engineering degree from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai. I worked with Prof. Ranjani Parthasarathi for my undergraduate thesis. I also worked for a year at D.E. Shaw India Software Private Ltd., Hyderabad, India. I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science (Thesis: Intra-Disk Parallelism) from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in August 2008.

Research

Current datacenter technologies like airside economizers and non-volatile memory are pushing the limits of datacenter efficiency in terms of performance, power, cost and reliability. This is a period of significant change and an opportunity to create new paradigms for datacenter research. My research interests include

• Datacenter Reliability (Impact of environmental conditions on server failures)
• Datacenter Power Provisioning
• Storage Efficiency (workload characterization, energy efficient storage, NVM)

1. ISCA 2008 - Sriram Sankar, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, Mircea R. Stan,"Intra-Disk Parallelism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come", International Symposium on Computer Architecture , June, 2008. (Acceptance rate - 14%)
   
   
2. MASCOTS 2008 - Sriram Sankar, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, Mircea R. Stan,"Sensitivity Based Power Management of Enterprise Storage Systems", IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, September, 2008. (Acceptance rate - 38%)
   
   
3. IEEE Transactions 2009 - Sriram Sankar, Yan Zhang, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, Mircea R. Stan, "Sensitivity-Based Optimization of Disk Architecture", IEEE Transactions on Computers , 58(1):69-81, January 2009
   
   
4. IEEE Micro Top Picks 2009 - Sudhanva Gurumurthi, Sriram Sankar, Mircea R. Stan, "Using Intradisk Parallelism to Build Energy Efficient Storage Systems", IEEE Micro Special Issue on Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences of 2008 , January/February 2009.
   
   
5. TPCTC 2009 - Swaroop Kavalanekar, Dushyanth Narayanan, Sriram Sankar, Eno Thereska, Kushagra Vaid, Bruce L. Worthington: "Measuring Database Performance in Online Services: A Trace-Based Approach". First TPC Technology Conference , August 24-28, 2009. (Acceptance rate - 38%)
   
   
6. IISWC 2009 - Sriram Sankar, Kushagra Vaid: "Storage characterization for unstructured data in online services applications", IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, October 2009. (Acceptance rate - 41%)
   
   
7. ICPE 2010 - Sriram Sankar, Kushagra Vaid: "Addressing the stranded power problem in datacenters using storage workload characterization". WOSP/SIPEW 2010: 217-222, First Joint WOSP/SIPEW International Conference on Performance Engineering, January 28-30, 2010 (Acceptance rate - 24%)
   
   
8. IEEE Micro Special Issue on Datacenter Computing - Christos Kozyrakis, Aman Kansal, Sriram Sankar, and Kushagra Vaid, "Server Engineering Insights for Large-Scale Online Services", in IEEE Micro July August 2010 Special Issue on Datacenter Computing , IEEE, July 2010
   
   
9. TPCTC 2010 - Badriddine M. Khessib, Kushagra Vaid, Sriram Sankar, Chengliang Zhang: "Using Solid State Drives as a Mid-Tier Cache In Enterprise OLTP Applications", Second TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking , September, 2010.
   
   
10. ICPE 2011 - Sriram Sankar, Kushagra Vaid, and Harry Rogers, "Energy-Delay based Provisioning for Large Datacenters: An Energy-Efficient and Cost Optimal Approach", Industrial Applications and Experience Track, Second ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering , March 14-16, 2011.
    
    
11. DSN 2011 - Sriram Sankar, Mark Shaw and Kushagra Vaid. "Impact of Temperature on Hard Disk Drive Reliability in Large Datacenters", IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Hong Kong, June 2011
    
    
12. TPCTC 2011 - Christina Delimitrou, Sriram Sankar, Badriddine Khessib, Kushagra Vaid, Christos Kozyrakis. "Time and Cost-Efficient Modeling and Generation of Large-Scale TPC Workloads", In the Proc. of the Third TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking (TPC TC). In conjunction with VLDB, August 2011., Seattle, August 2011
    
    

Workshop and Short papers

1. EXERT 2011 - Christina Delimitrou, Sriram Sankar, Kushagra Vaid, Christos Kozyrakis. "Accurate Modeling and Generation of Storage I/O for Datacenter Workloads". In the Second Exascale Evaluation and Research Techniques Workshop, (EXERT) 2011. In conjunction with ASPLOS, March 2011.
   
   
2. NVM 2011 - Badriddine Khessib, Kushagra Vaid, Sriram Sankar, Mark Shaw. "Opportunities and Challenges of Using Solid State Drives in Large Scale Datacenters", Non-Volatile Memories Workshop 2011, San Diego CA, March 2011.
   
   
3. ISPASS 2011 - Christina Delimitrou, Sriram Sankar, Kushagra Vaid, Christos Kozyrakis, "Storage I/O Generation and Replay for Datacenter Applications", Short Paper, IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, ISPASS 2011.
   
   
4. IISWC 2010 - Sriram Sankar, Kushagra Vaid, and Harry Rogers, "Energy-Delay Characterization of Online Services Applications for Optimal Datacenter Provisioning", IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, IISWC 2010.
   
   
5. ACLD 2009 - Sriram Sankar and Kushagra Vaid - "Server Rightsizing Using Storage Characterization for Online Services Environments", ISCA workshop on Architectural Concerns in Large Datacenters, ACLD 2009.
   
   
6. HiPC 2004 - "Basic Block Architecture for Power Saving"- Dipak Krishnamani, Madhavi K, Sriram S and Dr.Ranjani Parthasarathi.- *Best Poster - Runner up Award*, International Conference on High Performance Computing, Bangalore, India.
   
   
7. HiPC 2004 - "FPGA based High Performance Computing for Haptic Simulation in Virtual Environment" - Rohan Rebello and Sriram S, International Conference on High Performance Computing, Bangalore, India.