I have completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science and will be joining IBM Research. My research interests include operating systems, file systems, networking, and security.
Research Projects
My primary research projects are related to cloud native storage and are collaborations with researchers at IBM Research at Almaden.
Function as a Service (FaaS, sometimes also known as
"serverless computing") platforms have become popular for web
applications due to their elasticity and attractive billing and
programming models. These features make FaaS potentially useful
for non-web applications as well. However, the restrictions
currently imposed by the major cloud providers limits the range
of applications that can be transitioned to FaaS platforms. The
restriction that we are addressing in this research is the lack
of access to shared, persistent file systems from FaaS
applications. We plan to demonstrate how access to shared
persistent file systems enables a wider range of applications
to take advantage of FaaS platforms. We also intend to develop
a file system that accelerates workloads for common FaaS data
exchange scenarios.
Modern cloud computing is undergoing a transformation, driven
by containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes and the rising
popularity of microservice based architectures. The result is that cloud
workloads are now more diverse and cloud applications are more elastic and more
dynamic. Storage operations that were previously infrequent like volume
creation and deletion are now executed dozens or hundreds of times every day.
Understanding the performance of an application or storage system in this
environment is difficult because there are no tools that can recreate all of
these new cloud native conditions. To address this problem, we are designing
and building a benchmark capable of generating workloads that are
representative of modern, cloud native environments. This benchmark will
include measurement and analysis components to help debug performance problems,
and it will be used to evaluate and study storage performance in cloud native
environments.
Publications
Balancing Costs and Durability for Serverless Data Alex Merenstein, Xinran Wang, Vasily Tarasov, Prajjawal Agarwal, Scott Guthridge, Kapil Thakkar, Katherine Wu, Ali Anwar, Erez Zadok The 38th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST'24) PDF
F3: Serving Files Efficiently in Serverless Computing Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Scott Guthridge, Erez Zadok 16th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR'23) Won best paper award PDF
(Poster) F3: Serving Files Efficiently in Serverless Computing Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Scott Guthridge, Erez Zadok 12st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '23) Poster
SpecNFS: A Challenge Dataset Towards Extracting Formal Models from Natural Language Specifications
Sayontan Ghosh, Amanpreet Singh, Alex Merenstein, Wei Su, Scott Smolka, Erez Zadok, Niranjan Balasubramanian 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC'22) PDFPresentation
CNSBench: A Cloud Native Storage Benchmark Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Deepavali Bhagwat, Julie Lee, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitris Skourtis, Yang Yang, Erez Zadok 19th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '21) PDFPresentation
The Case for Benchmarking Control Operations in Cloud Native Storage Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Deepavali Bhagwat, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitris Skourtis, Erez Zadok 12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage (HotStorage '20) PDFPresentation
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, Stony Brook University (August 2018-May 2024)
M.S., Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (August 2014-December 2016)
B.S., Computer Engineering, Lehigh University (August 2010-May 2014)
