Sustainable Systems Laboratory
The Sustainable Systems Laboratory (SSL) is dedicated to research pursuing good systems in our increasingly informational world. "Good" is not a word to be used lightly, but it's our hope that good persists — our work is driven by a view of computer systems that treats sustainability itself as a good goal. The bridge that lasts is a good bridge. The engineer who builds systems that have a lasting positive impact is a good engineer.
We view building a good system as being about more than just computing — it requires a solid grasp of the context in which the technology is applied. We also hold the complementary belief that just computing — the application of computing technologies for just and beneficial outcomes — is more than a narrow focus on any one traditional performance metric. In short, we believe that just computing must be part of a sustainable system, and that a sustainable world of digital data is about more than just the computing that supports it.
As we live in an increasingly informational world, our work has a deep foundation in traditional data storage systems research. The Sustainable Systems Lab hosts the longest-running data storage conference, MSST, at Santa Clara University's School of Engineering, which has been home to more data storage history than most people realize.
We have also hosted the International Association of Computing and Philosophy's 2022 annual meeting, and are supportive of scholarship on the philosophy, ethics, theology, and policy issues surrounding computing and data systems.
Threads of work
Our research operates along three interwoven threads. Each can stand alone, but the lab's unique character comes from how they inform one another.
Resilient and efficient storage systems
Data storage is the substrate beneath nearly every computing concern, and the place where decisions about durability, energy, and access most directly meet physical reality. We study how to keep data alive at lower cost — to users, enterprises, and the planet.
Systems thinking and societal questions
The reasoning patterns of systems software — caching, redundancy, fault domains, scheduling, fairness under contention, etc. — all have analogues in policy, infrastructure, and ethics. We translate carefully between the two, and resist false equivalences. We also consider the societal context, influences, and implications of computing technologies.
What sustainability requires of computing
Sustainable computing is more than just computing. And so we treat sustainability not as a constraint applied after the fact, but as a desirable primary property and design goal from the very beginning, and we pursue work that takes the ethical and societal stakes very seriously.