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Xin Jin general exam
by Melissa M. Lawson 23 Apr '13

23 Apr '13

Xin Jin will present his research seminar/general exam on Monday April 29 at 2:30PM in Room 401 (note room!). The members of his committee are: Jennifer Rexford (advisor), Michael Freedman, and Kai Li. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ----- Original Message ----- The title is "SoftCell: Taking Control of Cellular Core Networks". Existing cellular networks suffer from inflexible and expensive equipment, and complex control-plane protocols. To address these challenges, we present SoftCell, a scalable architecture for supporting fine-grained policies for mobile devices in cellular core networks. The SoftCell controller realizes high-level service polices by directing traffic over paths that traverse a sequence of middleboxes, optimized to the network conditions and user locations. To ensure scalability, the core switches forward traffic on hierarchical addresses (grouped by base station) and policy tags (identifying paths through middleboxes). This minimizes data-plane state in the core switches, and pushes all fine-grained state to software switches at the base stations. These access switches apply fine-grained rules, specified by the controller, to map all traffic to the appropriate addresses and tags. SoftCell guarantees that packets in the same connection traverse the same sequence of middleboxes in both directions, even in the presence of mobility. Our characterization of real LTE workloads, micro-benchmarks on our prototype controller, and large-scale simulations demonstrate that SoftCell improves the flexibility of cellular core networks, while enabling the use of inexpensive commodity switches and middleboxes. [1] L. L. Peterson and B. S. Davie, Computer networks: a systems approach. Morgan Kaufmann, 2007. [2] J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, “End-to-end arguments in system design,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), vol. 2, no. 4, 1984. [3] M. Casado, M. J. Freedman, J. Pettit, J. Luo, N. Gude, N. McKeown, and S. Shenker, “Rethinking enterprise network control,” IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol. 17, August 2009 . [4] N. McKeown, T. Anderson, H. Balakrishnan, G. Parulkar, L. Peterson, J. Rexford, S. Shenker, and J. Turner, “OpenFlow: Enabling innovation in campus networks,” SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008. [5] A. R. Curtis, J. C. Mogul, J. Tourrilhes, P. Yalagandula, P. Sharma, and S. Banerjee, “DevoFlow: Scaling flow management for high-performance networks,” in ACM SIGCOMM, August 2011 . [6] A. Greenberg, J. R. Hamilton, N. Jain, S. Kandula, C. Kim, P. Lahiri, D. A. Maltz, P. Patel, and S. Sengupta, “VL2: A scalable and flexible data center network,” in ACM SIGCOMM, August 2009 . [7] R. Niranjan Mysore, A. Pamboris, N. Farrington, N. Huang, P. Miri, S. Radhakrishnan, V. Subramanya, and A. Vahdat, “PortLand: a scalable fault-tolerant layer 2 data center network fabric,” in ACM SIGCOMM, August 2009 . [8] D. Joseph, A. Tavakoli, and I. Stoica, “A policy-aware switching layer for data centers,” in ACM SIGCOMM, August 2008 . [9] Z. Wang, Z. Qian, Q. Xu, Z. Mao, and M. Zhang, “An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks,” in ACM SIGCOMM, August 2011 . [10] M. Z. Shafiq, L. Ji, A. X. Liu, and J. Wang, “Characterizing and modeling internet traffic dynamics of cellular devices,” in ACM SIGMETRICS, June 2011 . [11] K.-K. Yap, R. Sherwood, M. Kobayashi, T.-Y. Huang, M. Chan, N. Handigol, N. McKeown, and G. Parulkar, “Blueprint for introducing innovation into wireless mobile networks,” in ACM VISA Workshop, August 2010 .

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D Shue preFPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 18 Apr '13

18 Apr '13

David Shue will present his preFPO on Thursday April 25 at 9AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Michael Freedman, advisor; Jennifer Rexford and Anees Shaikh (IBM Research), readers; Vivek Pai and Margaret Martonosi, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. -------------------------------------------- Title: Performance Isolation and Fairness for Multi-Tenant Cloud Storage Abstract: Shared storage services enjoy wide adoption in commercial clouds. But most systems today provide weak performance isolation and fairness between tenants, if at all. Misbehaving or high-demand tenants can overload the shared service and disrupt other well-behaved tenants, leading to unpredictable performance and violating SLAs. In this thesis, we present Pisces, a system for achieving datacenter-wide per-tenant performance isolation and fairness in shared key-value storage. Today’s approaches for multi-tenant resource allocation are based either on per-VM allocations or hard rate limits that assume uniform workloads to achieve high utilization. Pisces provides per-tenant weighted fair shares (or minimal rates) of the aggregate resources over the entire service, even when different tenants’ partitions are co-located and when demand for different partitions is skewed, time-varying, or bottlenecked by different server resources. Our key insight was to decompose the system-wide fair sharing problem into a combination of four complementary mechanisms—partition placement, weight allocation, replica selection, and weighted fair queuing—that operate on different time-scales and combine to achieve per-tenant max-min fairness. While Pisces provides fairness for key-value storage systems that leverage asynchronous writes for performance, many storage systems require stronger durability guarantees and often provide rich data models that can support arbitrary computation in the form of UDF's or map/reduce functionality. Achieving predictable performance in these systems requires fine-grained per-tenant resource allocation over multiple resources (e.g network, disk, and CPU). In the second part of this thesis, w e generalize and extend the PIsces per-node scheduling model with Libra, a multi-resource allocation library for building predictable shared services.

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lunchtime Tue Apr 23 talk on automated formal analysis of Internet routing systems
by Jennifer Rexford 17 Apr '13

17 Apr '13

Speaker: Anduo Wang, U. Penn, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~anduo/ Title: Automated Formal Analysis of Internet Routing Systems Date/time: 12:30-1:20pm Tue Apr 23 (lunch served 12-12:30) Location: 402 in CS building Abstract: The past twenty years have witnessed significant advances in formal modeling, system verification and testing of network protocols. However a long-standing challenge in these approaches is the decoupling of formal reasoning process and the actual distributed implementation. This talk presents my thesis work on bridging formal reasoning and actual implementation in the context of today’s Internet routing. I will present the Formally Safe Routing (FSR) toolkit, that combines the use of declarative networking, routing algebra, and SMT solver techniques, in order to synthesize faithful distributed routing implementations from verified network models. Next, I will describe our work on scaling up formal analysis of lnternet-scale configurations. Our core technique uses a configuration rewriting calculus for transforming large network configurations into smaller instances, while preserving routing behaviors. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of my ongoing and future work, on synthesizing provably correct network configurations for the emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) platforms.

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CITP Event Brad Smith – Immigration, Education, and the Future of Computer Science in America Friday, April 19, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 17 Apr '13

17 Apr '13

Brad Smith – Immigration, Education, and the Future of Computer Science in America Date: Friday, April 19, 2013 Time: 12:30 PM Location: 3rd Floor Open Space, Sherrerd Hall Streaming Live: https://www.youtube.com/user/citpprinceton Brad Smith is Microsoft’s General Counsel and leads the company’s Department of Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA). He is responsible for the company’s legal work, its intellectual property portfolio and patent licensing business, and its government affairs and philanthropic work. Since becoming general counsel in 2002, Smith has overseen numerous negotiations leading to competition law and intellectual property agreements with governments around the world and with companies across the IT sector. He has led the launch of global campaigns to bring enforcement actions against those engaged in software piracy and counterfeiting, malware, consumer fraud, and other digital crimes. Before joining Microsoft in 1993, Smith was a partner at Covington & Burling, having worked in the firm’s Washington, D.C., and London offices. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and received his law degree at Columbia University.

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Colloquium Speaker Ranjitha Kumar, Mon April 15, 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 12 Apr '13

12 Apr '13

Design Mining the Web Ranjitha Kumar , Stanford University Monday, April 15th, 4:30pm Computer Science 105 The Web has transformed the nature of creative work. For the first time, millions of people have a direct outlet for sharing their creations with the world. As a result, the Web has become the largest repository of design knowledge in human history, and the ensuing "democratization of design" has created a critical feedback loop, engendering a new culture of reuse and remixing. The means and methods designers employ to draw on prior work, however, remain mostly informal and ad hoc. How can content producers find relevant examples amongst hundreds of millions of possibilities and leverage existing design practice to inform and improve their creations? My research explores data-driven techniques for working with examples at scale during the design process, automating search and curation, enabling rapid retargeting, and learning generative probabilistic models to support new design interactions. Knowledge discovery and data mining have revolutionized informatics; in this talk, I'll discuss what we can learn from mining design. Ranjitha Kumar is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, where she builds principled, data-driven tools for amplifying human creativity in design. Her work has received best paper awards or nominations at both of the premiere HCI conferences (CHI and UIST), and been recognized by the machine learning community through invited papers at IJCAI and ICML. She is the recipient of the 2011 Google PhD Fellowship in Design Development, and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford.

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4:30pm Wed Apr 10 talk on NetFPGA platform in room CS 402
by Jennifer Rexford 10 Apr '13

10 Apr '13

Speaker: Andrew Moore (University of Cambridge) Title: NetFPGA: The Flexible Open-Source Networking Platform Time: 4:30pm Wednesday April 10 Place: CS 402 Abstract: The NetFPGA is an open platform enabling researchers and instructors to build high-speed, hardware-accelerated networking systems. The NetFPGA is the de-facto experimental platform for line-rate implementations of network research and it continues with a new generation platform capable of 4x10Gbps. The target audience is not restricted to hardware researchers: the NetFPGA provides the ideal platform for research across a wide range of networking topics from architecture to algorithms and from energy-efficient design to routing and forwarding. The most prominent NetFPGA success is OpenFlow, which in turn has reignited the Software Defined Networking movement. NetFPGA enabled OpenFlow by providing a widely available open-source development platform capable of line-rate and was, until its commercial uptake, the reference platform for OpenFlow. NetFPGA enables high-impact network research. This seminar will combine presentation and demonstration; no knowledge of hardware programming languages (eg Verilog/VHDL) is required. A NetFPGA 10G card will be awarded as a door-prize amongst the seminar attendees.

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Colloquium Speaker Matei Zaharia Thurs April 11, 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 09 Apr '13

09 Apr '13

Making Big Data Analytics Interactive and Real-Time Matei Zaharia , University of California, Berkeley Thursday, April 11, 2013, 4:30pm Computer Science 105 The rapid growth in data volumes requires new computer systems that scale out across hundreds of machines. While early frameworks, such as MapReduce, handled large-scale batch processing, the demands on these systems have also grown. Users quickly needed to run (1) more interactive ad-hoc queries, (2) more complex multi-pass algorithms (e.g. machine learning and graph processing), and (3) real-time processing on large data streams. In this talk, we present a single abstraction, resilient distributed datasets (RDDs), that supports all of these emerging workloads by providing efficient and fault-tolerant in-memory data sharing. We have used RDDs to build a stack of computing systems including the Spark parallel engine, Shark SQL processor, and Spark Streaming engine. Spark and Shark can run machine learning algorithms and interactive queries up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce, while Spark Streaming enables fault-tolerant stream processing at significantly higher scales than were possible before. These systems, along with several resource allocation and scheduling algorithms we have developed along the way, have been used in multiple industry and research applications, and have a growing open source community with 14 companies contributing in the past year. Matei Zaharia is a PhD student at UC Berkeley, working with Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica on topics in systems, cloud computing and networking. He is also a committer on Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. His work is supported by a Google PhD fellowship. Matei got his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

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J Farnham preFPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 03 Apr '13

03 Apr '13

Jesse Farnham will present his preFPO on Friday April 12 at 9AM in Room 302 (note room!). The members of his committee are: Mona Singh, advisor; Olga Troyanskaya and Andrea LaPaugh, readers; Vivek Pai and Tom Funkhouser, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. --------------------------- "Organization and function acquisition in cellular networks" A main goal of biology is to understand the functional organization of organisms. In this thesis, we apply computational techniques to large, noisy biological datasets such as protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks and expression microarrays in order to elucidate principles of how genes in PPI networks acquire new functions and contribute to the overall functional organization of life. First, we investigate the functional organization of PPI networks by presenting a metric, functional insularity, that quantifies the degree to which a protein interacts with other proteins of similar function. We find high variation in insularity values, and we identify several differences between high- and low-insularity proteins. Secondly, we investigate function acquisition by human genes by identifying changes in protein-protein interactions, gene expression, and other markers of function as genes age. Our results indicate the presence of a tradeoff between modularity and connectivity in PPI network organization; furthermore, our results suggest that young genes acquire new functions gradually as they age, allowing the functional organization of the cell to evolve over time.

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The Future of Internet Policy, Fri Apr 5 @ 4:30 in Sherrerd 101
by Stephen Schultze 02 Apr '13

02 Apr '13

Hello CS'ers, This is our very-occasional reminder that the Center for Information Technology Policy, across the quad in Sherrerd Hall, has many events of interest to you throughout the year. You can view and subscribe to our events calendar here: https://citp.princeton.edu/events/ This week, we have two events that you may want to check out: Thursday, April 4 at 12:30pm (lunch is provided) Grayson Barber -- Drones Are Like Flying Computers 306 Sherrerd Hall https://citp.princeton.edu/event/barber/ Friday, April 5 at 4:30pm (reception follows) Richard S. Whitt -- From SOPA to WCIT: A Glimpse of the Future of Internet Policy 101 Sherrerd Hall https://citp.princeton.edu/event/whitt/ - Richard Whitt is Corporate VP and Global Head of Public Policy and Government Relations, Motorola Mobility LLC, a subsidiary of Google Inc. Mr. Whitt will discuss how public policy grounded in the Internet’s architecture can best ensure that the Net fully enables tangible benefits such as innovation, economic growth, free expression, and user empowerment. In particular, recognizing that the Internet is rapidly becoming society’s chief operating system, Mr. Whitt will examine several recent examples of public policy threats to the Internet’s basic design principles. By contrast, an overarching public policy framework should be faithful to the multifaceted nature of the online world. Adhering to the deferential principle of “respect the functional integrity of the Internet,” in combination with the appropriate institutional and organizational implements, can help ensure that any potential regulation of Internet-based activities enables, rather than hinders, tangible and intangible benefits for end users. Rick oversees all interactions with government policymakers around the world at Motorola Mobility, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. Previously, he spent five and a half years in Google’s DC office, working on a variety of public policy issues. Most recently, he had served as director and managing counsel for federal policy, overseeing strategic thinking on privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, Internet governance, free expression, international trade, and telecom and media issues. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Rick founded and headed NetsEdge Consulting, a public policy consulting firm that provided legal analysis, regulatory strategy, and advocacy counsel. >From 1994 to 2006, Rick worked in the legal department at MCI Communications, where he served as vice president for federal law and policy. Rick previously spent over five years as an associate attorney in the communications practices of two large Washington, D.C.-based law firms. -- Stephen Schultze Associate Director, Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University https://citp.princeton.edu/

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Colloquium Speaker Jacob Abernethy, Tues April 2, 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 02 Apr '13

02 Apr '13

Learning in an Adversarial World, with Connections to Pricing, Hedging, and Routing Jacob Duncan Abernethy , University of Pennsylvania Tuesday, April 2, 2013 , 4:30pm Computer Science 105 Machine Learning is often viewed through the lens of statistics, where one tries to model or fit a set of data under stochastic conditions; for example, it is typical to assume one's observations were sampled IID. However, dating back to results of Blackwell and Hannan from the 1950s we know how to construct learning and decision strategies that possess robust guarantees even under adversarial conditions. Within this setting the goal of the learner is to "minimize regret" against any sequence of inputs. In this talk we lay out the framework, discuss some recent results, and we finish by exploring a couple of surprising applications and connections, including: (a) market making in combinatorial prediction markets, (b) routing with limited feedback, and (c) hedging derivative securities (e.g. European option contracts) in the worst-case, with a connection to the classical Black-Scholes option-pricing model. Jake received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from MIT in 2002 and a Master's degree in Computer Science from TTI-C in 2006. He recently finished a PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Peter Bartlett, and he is now the Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Pennsylvania. Jake has a particular focus on the intersection between machine learning, games and markets.

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