Patents by Inventor Vijayan Prabhakaran

Vijayan Prabhakaran has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 8103847
    Abstract: A controller of a Solid State Device (SSD) defines a mapping from memory devices, such as flash packages, that make up the SSD to one or more storage virtual containers. The storage virtual containers are exposed to an operating system by the controller through an interface. The operating system may then make operation requests to the one or more storage virtual containers, and the controller may use the mapping to fulfill the operation requests from the corresponding flash packages. The storage virtual containers are mapped to the flash packages to take advantage of the parallelism of the flash packages in the SSD so that the controller may fulfill operation requests received from the operating system in parallel.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 8, 2009
    Date of Patent: January 24, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: John D. Davis, Vijayan Prabhakaran
  • Patent number: 7962528
    Abstract: A system and method accelerates update of a metadata search database using PCPI differencing. After first populating the search database, a search agent generates a PCPI and utilizes a PCPI differencing technique to quickly identify changes between inode files of first and second PCPIs. The differences are noted as modified metadata and are written to a log file, which is later read by the search agent to update the search database.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 18, 2010
    Date of Patent: June 14, 2011
    Assignee: NetApp, Inc.
    Inventors: Shankar Pasupathy, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Garth Richard Goodson, Steven R. Kleiman
  • Publication number: 20110138106
    Abstract: A hybrid storage device uses a write cache such as a hard disk drive, for example, to cache data to a solid state drive (SSD). Data is logged sequentially to the write cache and later migrated to the SSD. The SSD is a primary storage that stores data permanently. The write cache is a persistent durable cache that may store data of disk write operations temporarily in a log structured fashion. A migration policy may be used to determine how long to cache the data in the write cache before migrating the data to the SDD. The migration policy may be implemented using one or more migration triggers that cause the contents of the write cache to be flushed to the SSD. Migration triggers may include a timeout trigger, a read threshold trigger, and a migration size trigger, for example.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 7, 2009
    Publication date: June 9, 2011
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Vijayan Prabhakaran, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Gokul Soundararajan
  • Publication number: 20110067030
    Abstract: A job scheduler may schedule concurrent distributed jobs in a computer cluster by assigning tasks from the running jobs to compute nodes while balancing fairness with efficiency. Determining which tasks to assign to the compute nodes may be performed using a network flow graph. The weights on at least some of the edges of the graph encode data locality, and the capacities provide constraints that ensure fairness. A min-cost flow technique may be used to perform an assignment of the tasks represented by the network flow graph. Thus, online task scheduling with locality may be mapped onto a network flow graph, which in turn may be used to determine a scheduling assignment using min-cost flow techniques. The costs may encode data locality, fairness, and starvation-freedom.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 16, 2009
    Publication date: March 17, 2011
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Michael Isard, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Jonathan James Currey, Ehud Wieder, Kunal Talwar
  • Patent number: 7849354
    Abstract: Multiple versions of data on different sets of machines allow a system to degrade gracefully even when experiencing excessive failures. When excessive failures cause the latest versions to be unavailable, the system becomes degraded, but still offers an old version if available. A most recent coherent set of the available older versions is found and provided. The degree of degradation increases gradually as the system experiences more and more failures. Graceful degradation is desirably complementary to fault tolerance.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 12, 2007
    Date of Patent: December 7, 2010
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Vijayan Prabhakaran, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Lidong Zhou, Roy Levin, Chandramohan A. Thekkath
  • Publication number: 20100262752
    Abstract: A controller of a Solid State Device (SSD) defines a mapping from memory devices, such as flash packages, that make up the SSD to one or more storage virtual containers. The storage virtual containers are exposed to an operating system by the controller through an interface. The operating system may then make operation requests to the one or more storage virtual containers, and the controller may use the mapping to fulfill the operation requests from the corresponding flash packages. The storage virtual containers are mapped to the flash packages to take advantage of the parallelism of the flash packages in the SSD so that the controller may fulfill operation requests received from the operating system in parallel.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 8, 2009
    Publication date: October 14, 2010
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: John D. Davis, Vijayan Prabhakaran
  • Publication number: 20100106753
    Abstract: A cyclic commit protocol is used to store relationships between transactions and is used by the technology to determine whether a transaction is committed or not. The protocol allows creation of a cycle of transactions which can be used to recover the state of a storage device after a host failure by identifying the last committed version of intention records as committed or uncommitted based on the data stored in the physical pages.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 24, 2008
    Publication date: April 29, 2010
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Vijayan Prabhakaran, Lidong Zhou, Thomas Lee Rodeheffer
  • Patent number: 7693864
    Abstract: A system and method accelerates update of a metadata search database using PCPI differencing. After first populating the search database, a search agent generates a PCPI and utilizes a PCPI differencing technique to quickly identify changes between inode files of first and second PCPIs. The differences are noted as modified metadata and are written to a log file, which is later read by the search agent to update the search database.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 3, 2006
    Date of Patent: April 6, 2010
    Assignee: NetApp, Inc.
    Inventors: Shankar Pasupathy, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Garth Richard Goodson, Steven R. Kleiman
  • Publication number: 20080313496
    Abstract: Multiple versions of data on different sets of machines allow a system to degrade gracefully even when experiencing excessive failures. When excessive failures cause the latest versions to be unavailable, the system becomes degraded, but still offers an old version if available. A most recent coherent set of the available older versions is found and provided. The degree of degradation increases gradually as the system experiences more and more failures. Graceful degradation is desirably complementary to fault tolerance.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 12, 2007
    Publication date: December 18, 2008
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Vijayan Prabhakaran, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Lidong Zhou, Roy Levin, Chandramohan A. Thekkath