Campus Directory

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/College/Unit Computer Science and Engineering

Title Professor Emeritus
Veritas Presidential Chair in Storage
Director Emeritus, NSF IUCRC Center for Research in Storage Systems

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Crown College

Faculty Type Emeriti

Areas of Expertise Computer Engineering
Computer and Network Security
Software
Cloud Computing
Supercomputing
Computer Science

Web Site

Primary Office Location Engineering Building 2
337A

Office Hours By appointment

Mail Stop SOE3

Biography, Education and Training

Ethan L. Miller is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Veritas Presidential Chair in Storage.  He is the Founding Director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS), where he served as Director for seven years, and was a founding member of the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) at UC Santa Cruz. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and his publications have received multiple Best Paper awards.  Prof. Miller received an Sc.B. from Brown University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1995, and has been on the UC Santa Cruz faculty since 2000.  He has co-authored over 160 papers in a range of topics in file and storage systems, operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, information retrieval, and computer security. He was a member of the team that developed Ceph, a scalable high-performance distributed file system for scientific computing that is now being adopted by several high-end computing organizations.  His work on reliability and security for distributed storage is also widely recognized, as is his work on secure, efficient long-term archival storage and scalable metadata systems.

His current research projects, which are funded by the National Science Foundation and industry support for the CRSS and SSRC, include system support for byte-addressable non-volatile memory (Twizzler), archival storage systems, and reliable and secure storage systems. Prof. Miller has worked closely with industry to help move research results into commercial use at companies such as NetApp and Veritas, and has been working with Pure Storage since 2009 to develop reliable high-performance flash-based storage systems, where he is a co-inventor on over 125 patents.  Additional information is available at https://www.crss.ucsc.edu/person/elm.html.

Research Interests

• File & storage systems
• Non-volatile memory systems
• Operating systems
• Computer security
• Distributed systems

Selected Publications

• Strong Security for Network-Attached Storage (FAST 2002)
• Disk Scrubbing in Large Archival Storage Systems (MASCOTS 2004)
• Store, forget, and check: Using algebraic signatures to check remotely administered storage (ICDCS 2006)
• Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System (OSDI 2006)
• Pergamum: Replacing Tape with Energy Efficient, Reliable, Disk-Based Archival Storage (FAST 2008)
• Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads (USENIX 2008)
• Spyglass: Fast, Scalable Metadata Search for Large-Scale Storage Systems (FAST 2009)
• The Effectiveness of Deduplication on Virtual Machine Disk Images (SYSTOR 2009)
• POTSHARDS—A Secure, Long-Term Storage System (ACM Trans on Storage, 2009)
• Design Issues for a Shingled Write Disk System (MSST 2010)
• Analysis of Workload Behavior in Scientific and Historical Long-Term Data Repositories (ACM Trans on Storage, 2012)
• Screaming Fast Galois Field Arithmetic Using Intel SIMD Extensions (FAST 2013)
• Horus: Fine-Grained Encryption-Based Security for Large-Scale Storage (FAST 2013)
• HANDS: A Heuristically Arranged Non-Backup In-line Deduplication System (ICDE 2013)
• SMRDB: Key-Value Data Store for Shingled Magnetic Recording Disks (SYSTOR 2015)
• CAPES: Unsupervised Storage Performance Tuning Using Neural Network-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning (Supercomputing '17)
• Optimizing Systems for Byte-Addressable NVM by Reducing Bit Flipping (FAST 2019)
• Twizzler: a Data-Centric OS for Non-Volatile Memory (USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2020)

Advisees, Grad Students & Researchers Bittman, Daniel (dbittman)
, (jbyron)
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, (dpuranda)

Courses CSE 130: Principles of Computer Systems Design
CSE 134: Embedded Operating Systems
CSE 132: Computer Security
CSE 231: Advanced Operating Systems
CSE 233: Advanced Computer Security
CSE 237: Advanced Storage Systems
CSE 280S: Systems Research Seminar
CSE 290S: Advanced Topics in Computer Systems