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NSF Grant Award to Dr. WangApril 24, 2012

NSF 1065373 $148,188 CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: "Facets: Exploring Semantic Equivalence of Files to Improve Storage Systems" awarded to Dr. Andy Wang in collaboration with the LASR Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The focus of the proposal is on finding semantically equivalent files in an efficient and scalable manner. If two files are identical, they are candidates for optimizations to reduce storage costs, increase performance, and generally improve the system. Traditionally, two files are only considered equivalent if they are byte-by-byte identical - i.e., byte equivalence. However, this team's preliminary research shows that there are many other files that are essentially equivalent, even though the bytes they contain are not the same. This proposal will investigate how to find such cases and perform optimizations that make use of semantic equivalence, rather than byte equivalence.