Dr. Herodotos Herodotou and his research associate, Dr. Elena Kakoulli, have published their work titled "OctopusFS: A Distributed File System with Tiered Storage Management" in the 2017 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data to be held in Chicago, IL, USA. ACM SIGMOD publishes landmark papers of the highest quality and significance in the general area of large-scale data management. ACM SIGMOD is one of the oldest and most prestigious conferences in its field and it is well-known for its impact history and its rigorous review process.

The work exploits the recent improvements in memory, storage media, and networks for designing and developing OctopusFS, a novel distributed file system that can run on top of thousands of compute nodes while being aware of heterogeneous storage media (e.g., memory, SSDs, HDDs, NAS) with different capacities and performance characteristics. The system automates data management across the storage media and cluster nodes by making intelligent data placement and retrieval decisions based on the requirements of fault tolerance, data and load balancing, and throughput maximization. At the same time, the storage media are explicitly exposed to users and applications, allowing them to choose the distribution and placement of replicas in the cluster based on their own performance and fault tolerance requirements. OctopusFS can be readily used with popular data-intensive processing systems, such as Hadoop and Spark, for offering increased performance and better cluster utilization.