Keynote: “Flashing the roads ahead”

The flash memory technology has dramatically changed the capabilities and form factors of persistent computer storage. Without continuous scaling and advances of the technology, we wouldn´t have seen the widespread deployment of attractive mobile devices or pleasantly fast response times of large social network services that we tap every day. In this talk, I will first describe how computing systems have traditionally interfaced with flash memory devices in the past, leading to today´s prevalent form of solid-state drives (SSDs). Moreover, there are growing interests among the industry and academic communities in renewed flash storage interfaces (and features) for several compelling reasons. I will discuss these trends and suggest promising future directions to accommodate some of the immediate needs.