POSE Phase I: Toward a Community-Driven Fast Emulator (FEMU) Ecosystem for Next-Generation Storage Systems Research and Innovation

High-performance computer storage underpins the nation's leadership in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and cloud infrastructure. However, the high costs and scarcity of next-generation hardware constrain innovation. This project addresses this bottleneck by building a sustainable, community-governed open-source ecosystem around Fast Emulator (FEMU), a widely used solid-state drive (SSD) emulator. FEMU emulation enables rapid design of advanced computer storage systems using commodity hardware. By lowering barriers and expanding access to storage system research, the project accelerates innovation, strengthens research reproducibility, and broadens participation in computing. The outcomes support U.S. leadership in data-intensive computing, enhance academia–industry collaboration, and provide a model for managing impactful open-source research software. This project conducts scoping and planning activities to transition FEMU, a Quick Emulator (QEMU)-based SSD emulator, into a sustainable open-source ecosystem. Storage research faces several challenges, including fragmented tool chains, limited access to pre-silicon hardware, and a lack of standardized platforms for reproducible, full-stack evaluation. FEMU addresses these challenges by providing high-fidelity, software-defined emulation of modern and emerging storage interfaces, enabling research that spans applications, operating systems, and device firmware. By transitioning FEMU from centrally governed software to an open-source ecosystem, this project creates a decentralized governance structure and distributed development model for FEMU. This project pursues the creation of this open-source community through three objectives: (1) ecosystem discovery and community engagement to identify users, priority use cases, and barriers to contribution; (2) contributor infrastructure and training, including onboarding pathways and continuous integration and testing pipelines; and (3) governance and security, including a transparent governance charter and security policies. The outcome is a vendor-neutral, secure open-source ecosystem that enables pre-hardware prototyping, advances reproducible storage research, and sustains community-driven development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2550145 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Huaicheng Li | Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, BLACKSBURG, VA | Award Amount: $299,946 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2550145 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2550145.html