The 25th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2011) presented the Best Paper Award to Feng Chen (Ph.D.'10, Intel Labs), David A. Koufaty (Intel Labs), and Xiaodong Zhang (OSU-CSE Chairman) to their paper entitled: "Hystor: Making the Best Use of the Solid State Drives in High Performance Storage System." You may find the details of paper here.
The annual conference this year was held in Tucson, Arizona, Mary 31 to June 3, 2011. The authors of the paper present a unique and effective storage-based solution to maximize the SSD performance in a scalable and large storage system at low cost. Most existing solutions including commercial systems treat SSDs as buffer caches, which is easy to implement, but often not very cost- and space efficient in practice. The Hystor system presented in the paper has been implemented and tested as a prototype for a next generation storage solution at Intel Labs.