M&S Lab · School of Software, Kookmin University
Building high-performance, energy-efficient, and secure storage systems
We study the system software that sits between applications and modern storage devices — from SSD firmware to the operating system kernel and the virtualization layer.
About the Lab
The Memory & Storage Laboratory (M&S Lab) at Kookmin University investigates how operating systems, device firmware, and hardware should cooperate to get the most out of modern memory and storage devices. Our central theme is I/O completion that adapts dynamically to workload characteristics: deciding, at run time, whether an I/O should be completed by polling, by an interrupt, or by an adaptive hybrid of the two.
Our work spans the full I/O stack — SSD firmware, block layer, kernel I/O path, and virtualized storage — and reaches beyond performance to energy efficiency and security. Results have appeared at top-tier venues including USENIX FAST, ACM HotStorage, HPCA, DAC, and IEEE TC/TCAD, and have been transferred into granted US and Korean patents.
Research Areas
I/O Completion Optimization
Polling, interrupts, and adaptive hybrid polling for high-performance SSDs, switched dynamically under CPU contention.
Virtualized I/O & Storage
Expanding the polled I/O path of the Linux kernel so that virtual machines get low-latency storage access.
Storage Security
Ransomware defense inside the SSD: memory-efficient overwrite detection implemented at the firmware level.
SSD/NVM Performance
Exploiting device-internal parallelism and nonvolatile memory to accelerate application launch and data access.
Energy-Efficient Memory
Co-optimizing performance, energy, and device lifetime across PCM, STT-RAM, flash, and DRAM based systems.
News & Highlights
- 2026 DPAS is published at USENIX FAST 2026 — a dynamic I/O completion method achieving a 9% YCSB performance improvement on a 3D XPoint SSD. [Paper] [Artifact] [Demo]
- 2026 Korean Patent 10-2919645 on hybrid interrupt processing granted; US Patent Application 2026/0030187 on I/O completion processing published.
- 2024 Work on expanding the polled I/O path of Linux for virtualized environments presented at ACM HotStorage 2024. [Paper]
- 2023 US Patent 11,768,532 on I/O latency tracking for storage devices granted. [Patent]
- 2023 Ransomware-proof SSD design with memory-efficient overwrite detection published in IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems. [Paper]
Join Us
We are recruiting. M&S Lab welcomes graduate and undergraduate students who enjoy operating systems, storage systems, and computer architecture — and who want to see their ideas run on real kernels and real devices.
If you are interested, email ysjoo@kookmin.ac.kr with a short introduction and your transcript.
Contact
- Lab
- Memory & Storage Laboratory (M&S Lab), School of Software, Kookmin University
- Office
- Mirae Hall, Room 619
- Address
- 77, Jeongneung-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea 02707
- Phone
- +82-2-910-5429
- ysjoo at kookmin.ac.kr