Amsterdam Data Science Thesis Award
My master thesis on: “TropoDB: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of an Optimised KV-Store for NVMe Zoned Namespace Devices” won the ADS Thesis Award of 2022. The thesis was supervised by Animesh Trivedi and is available in full at TropoDB. The award itself can be seen at Winners-of-the-ads-thesis-awards-2022.
“Krijn delivered an absolutely thorough study into the performance and suitability of an emerging storage interface that leverages application-level knowledge to better employ flash storage devices. By the year 2025, we are expected to generate close to 200 Zettabytes of data yearly – large enough to cover the whole Pacific Ocean 200 times over if data bytes were visualized as grains of rice. In this context, his work on efficient data storage systems becomes crucial, as the world-first, complete ZNS-optimized data store. Starting from scratch, Krijn had to solve many unforeseeable scientific and engineering challenges associated with the development of new application-optimized data structures for ZNS devices. The reviewers were thoroughly impressed with the huge amount of work squeezed within 6 months of GIT-evidenced activity. The size of this thesis (200+ pages) could discourage the weak-hearted from even attempting to browse it, however, it is simply a reflection of the sheer amount of work. The context is beautifully introduced for experts and non-experts, and there are proper background and related works sections. The research questions are clearly formulated and mapped over the chapters. The research methods are appropriate and come with citations to related work. The thesis writing style is concise and clear. Even the Appendix contains a nugget, Krijn’s Self-reflection section. The reviewers fully appreciated the clarity and extent of this thesis’ societal impact, as it opens many avenues of future research and practice. The extensive benchmarking alone is a valuable societal contribution. The reviewers also commend Krijn on an excellent job promoting open science through extensive documentation and code artefacts fully published at https://github.com/atlarge-research/tropodb.”