Meet the people of CRSS: Dev Purandare

January 18, 2024

Q&A

 

Do you have any New Year's resolutions?

Yeah, I guess I just want to focus more on meditation. I’m trying this thing where instead of reacting to things, I want to respond to things. Like when we get emails, we often respond with our first impressions. My goal is to be less affected by events but to respond calmly instead. 

 

 

What’s your favorite bird?

Near campus specifically, I’d say the great horned owl. They’re very hard to spot. There’s one right outside my house, and I’ve only seen it once in the 2 years I’ve lived here but I hear them every night.

 

What is your research about?

Applications have been abstracted from storage for good reasons and we don’t want to change that. But at the same time we want to enable host device coordination without breaking abstractions. This is what my project Shimmer does. My project is a shim layer which acts between an application and an SSD. It adds hints, and changes the meaning of read write calls so that the application will be faster and induce less garbage collection on the device. The key thing is that it does not change the system or application in any way, so rather than breaking the abstraction, we add another abstraction in between.  

 

What do you hope to do when you graduate?

I’m actively looking for full time industry opportunities. I’d like to work on large scale systems or something like that. Long term I think I’d like to come back to academia because I do love teaching and research. But I think I need some more field experience first. 

 

Learn more about Dev below!

CRSS Contact: Purandare, Devashish