Chris Frost

chris@frostnet.net

I'm a software engineer at Google, where I help develop our distributed storage infrastructure. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in computer science with the TERTL group at UCLA.

My research interests include storage system consistency, performance, and usability. More broadly, they span systems, programming languages, and theory.

Projects and software

Fresh

BPFS. A file system that provides dramatically stronger durability and consistency guarantees using byte-addressable, persistent memory – in particular, phase change memory – and careful design.
Featherstitch. A storage system built around explicit disk write dependency tracking. (Also, a fun reason to play with large graphs in operating system kernels.)
Libprefetch. New file system prefetching techniques and interface that increase many nonsequential disk read throughputs by 5–20x.

scord. Reduces the disk space used by a subversion working copy with large and/or many files.
mswatch. Keeps two mailboxes synchronized more efficiently and with shorter delays than periodically synchronizing the two mailboxes over IMAP.

Dormant

JPred. Practical (modular and typesafe) predicate dispatch in Java.

Windows CE UPnP Audio/Video Framework. C++ framework for creating devices that implement the Universal Plug and Play Audio/Video Device Control Protocol (UPnP AV DCP).
Newton site. (As in, 1997.)

Publications

Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database (OSDI 2012, Best paper)
- James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Mike Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter Hochschild, Wilson Hsieh, Sebastian Kanthak, Eugene Kogan, Hongyi Li, Alexander Lloyd, Sergey Melnik, David Mwaura, David Nagle, Sean Quinlan, Rajesh Rao, Lindsay Rolig, Yasushi Saito, Michal Szymaniak, Christopher Taylor, Ruth Wang, and Dale Woodford
- PDF
Improving File System Consistency and Durability with Patches and BPFS (Ph.D. dissertation, 2010)
- Christopher Frost
- PDF; Featherstitch Project and BPFS Project
Better I/O Through Byte-Addressable, Persistent Memory (SOSP 2009)
- Jeremy Condit, Edmund B. Nightingale, Christopher Frost, Engin Ipek, Doug Burger, Benjamin Lee, and Derrick Coetzee
- PDF; Project; Presentation: PPTX, PDF; Video: MOV, OGG
Reducing Seek Overhead with Application-Directed Prefetching (USENIX 2009)
- Steve VanDeBogart, Christopher Frost, and Eddie Kohler
- PDF; Project
Expressive and Modular Predicate Dispatch for Java (TOPLAS, February 2009)
- Todd Millstein, Christopher Frost, Jason Ryder, and Alessandro Warth
- PDF; Project
Generalized File System Dependencies (SOSP 2007, Audience choice awardee)
- Christopher Frost, Mike Mammarella, Eddie Kohler, Andrew de los Reyes, Shant Hovsepian, Andrew Matsuoka, and Lei Zhang
- PDF; Project; Presentation: PPT, PDF; Video: AVI
Modularly Typesafe Interface Dispatch in JPred (FOOL/WOOD 2006)
- Christopher Frost and Todd Millstein
- PDF; Project; Presentation: PPT, PDF

(All)

Chris

I'm a software engineer at Google, developing distributed storage software. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in computer science with the TERTL group at UCLA, where I researched storage system consistency, performance, and usability, alongside our turtles. More broadly, my interests span systems, programming languages, and theory. I was also a member of the LUG and the ACM and TAed CS 111 (undergrad operating systems) for 2005–2006.

Outside of the lab, I enjoy biking, running, hiking, and backpacking; photography; and spouts of reading.

My undergrad days were at UVa, where I frolicked and schemed with friends in Theta Tau, ACM, Math Club, Brown, Honor, and the computer science and math departments. I've helped lasso computer science problems and systems while at UCLA, UVa, MIT, Microsoft Research, VMware, Google, Appian, Microsoft, Dynetics, and the US Army AMRDEC. Home is Huntsville, Alabama.