About

Peter Desnoyers is an Associate Professor affiliated with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on cloud technologies, as evidenced by his role as the principal investigator in a $1.55 million NSF grant awarded in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston University, aimed at accelerating innovations in cloud computing. Desnoyers is actively involved in advancing research in this area and contributes to the academic community through his faculty position at Northeastern University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Operating system
• Software engineering
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering
• Telecommunications
• World Wide Web
• Computer hardware
• Database
• Distributed computing
• Parallel computing

Selected publications

• 2DIO: A Cache-Accurate Storage Microbenchmark

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-20

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We introduce 2DIO, a microbenchmark creating cache-accurate, stressful I/O traces. While existing tools are limited to generating traces with well-behaved, concave hit ratio curves, 2DIO produces ones with tunable complex cache behaviors, particularly performance cliffs and plateaus. Our framework encodes a workload as a compact parameter triplet, capturing both short-term recency and long-term frequency. This parsimonious parameterization allows researchers to easily translate individual adjustments into predictable cache effects across various eviction policies, and enables the parameter space to be "swept" for exhaustive exploration of desired cache behavior, or to mimic real traces by calibrating parameters to match observed behaviors. The tuned parameters are portable, meaning if the scale of the system under evaluation changes, so too will the footprint and length of the trace, while the relative cache behaviors are preserved. Evaluations demonstrate 2DIO's ability to generate traces across a continuum of "what-if" cache behaviors and to reproduce real-world ones with high accuracy.

  PublisherDOI

• A Fast, Efficient, and Strongly-Consistent Object Store

  2025-11-19

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  S3-compatible object storage has become ubiquitous, used by an ever-expanding range of applications. Workload traces show that many of these applications treat object storage like a traditional file system, with many small reads and writes, yet object storage implementations have not kept up. Optimized for bulk storage, these systems cannot efficiently exploit modern SSDs, requiring large hardware installations to achieve operation rates typical of local file systems on modest machines.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The workflow motif: a widely-useful performance diagnosis abstraction for distributed applications

  ArXiv.org · 2025-05-31

  preprintOpen access

  Diagnosing problems in deployed distributed applications continues to grow more challenging. A significant reason is the extreme mismatch between the powerful abstractions developers have available to build increasingly complex distributed applications versus the simple ones engineers have available to diagnose problems in them. To help, we present a novel abstraction, the workflow motif, instantiations of which represent characteristics of frequently-repeating patterns within and among request executions. We argue that workflow motifs will benefit many diagnosis tasks, formally define them, and use this definition to identify which frequent-subgraph-mining algorithms are good starting points for mining workflow motifs. We conclude by using an early version of workflow motifs to suggest performance-optimization points in HDFS.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Persistent Memory Research in the Post-Optane Era

  2023 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  After over a decade of researcher anticipation for the arrival of persistent memory (PMem), the first shipments of 3D XPoint-based Intel Optane Memory in 2019 were quickly followed by its cancellation in 2022. Was this another case of an idea quickly fading from future to past tense, relegating work in this area to the graveyard of failed technologies?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beating the I/O bottleneck

  2022-03-28 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  With the increasing dominance of SSDs for local storage, today's network mounted virtual disks can no longer offer competitive performance. We propose a Log-Structured Virtual Disk (LSVD) that couples log-structured approaches at both the cache and storage layer to provide a virtual disk on top of S3-like storage. Both cache and backend store are order-preserving, enabling LSVD to provide strong consistency guarantees in case of failure. Our prototype demonstrates that the approach preserves all the advantages of virtual disks, while offering dramatic performance improvements over not only commonly used virtual disks, but the same disks combined with inconsistent (i.e. unsafe) local caching.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Open Cloud Testbed (OCT): A Platform for Research into new Cloud Technologies

  2021 · 18 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Operating system

  The NSF-funded Open Cloud Testbed (OCT) project is building and supporting a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms – the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. Testbeds such as OCT are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies – research that requires experiments which potentially change the operation of the cloud itself.This paper gives an overview of the Open Cloud Testbed, including an overview on the existing components OCT is based on and the description of new infrastructure and software extension. In addition, we present several use cases of OCT, including a description of FPGA-based research enabled by newly-deployed resources.

  PublisherDOI

• A Community Cache with Complete Information

  2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• μCache: a mutable cache for SMR translation layer

  2020-11-17 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) may be combined with conventional (re-writable) recording on the same drive; in host-managed drives shipping today this capability is used to provide a small number of re-writable zones, typically totaling a few tens of GB. Although these re-writable zones are widely used by SMR-aware applications, the literature to date has ignored them and focused on fully-shingled devices. We describe μCache, an SMR translation layer (STL) using re-writable (mutable) zones to take advantage of both workload spatial and temporal locality to reduce the garbage collection overhead resulted from out-of-place writes. In μCache the volume LBA space is divided into fixed -sized buckets and, on write access, the corresponding bucket is copied (promoted) to the re-writable zones, allowing subsequent writes to the same bucket be served in - place resulting in fewer garbage collection cycles. We evaluate μCache in simulation against real-world traces and show that with appropriate parameters it is able to hold the entire write working set of most workloads in re-writable storage, virtually eliminating garbage collection overhead. We also emulate μCache by replaying its translated traces against actual drive and show that 1) it outperforms its examined counterpart, an E-region based translation approach on average by 2x and up to 5.1x, and 2) it incurs additional latency only for a small fraction of write operations, (up to 10%) when compared with conventional non-shingled disks.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards Non-Intrusive Software Introspection and Beyond

  2020 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science

  Continuous verification and security analysis of software systems are of paramount importance to many organizations. The state-of-the-art for such operations implements agent-based approaches to inspect the provisioned software stack for security and compliance issues. However, this approach, which runs agents on the systems being analyzed, is vulnerable to some attacks, can incur substantial performance impact, and can introduce significant complexity. In this paper, we present the design and prototype implementation of a general-purpose approach for Non-intrusive Software Introspection (NSI). By adhering to NSI, organizations hosting in the cloud can as well control the software introspection workflow with reduced trust in the provider. Experimental analysis of real-world applications demonstrates that NSI presents a lightweight and scalable approach, and has a negligible impact on the performance of applications running on the instance being introspected.

  PublisherDOI

• Track-based Translation Layers for Interlaced Magnetic Recording.

  USENIX Annual Technical Conference · 2019-01-01 · 7 citations

  article
  Publisher

Recent grants

• CNS Core: Small: Byte-Addressable I/O Everywhere

  NSF · $500k · 2019–2023

• CAREER: Algorithms and Implementations For New Storage Technologies

  NSF · $450k · 2012–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Orran Krieger

  20 shared

• Prashant Shenoy

  13 shared

• Mohammad Hossein Hajkazemi

  NetApp (United States)

  11 shared

• Sahil Tikale

  11 shared

• Apoorve Mohan

  10 shared

• Mania Abdi

  Northeastern University

  10 shared

• Gene Cooperman

  Northeastern University

  10 shared

• Ata Türk

  State Street (United States)

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Desnoyers and Leeser Awarded $1.55M NSF Grant to Accelerate…