- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Sharva Pathak General Exam: Monday, May 12th, 2014 at 2pm in Room 402 (RESCHEDULED)
by Nicki Gotsis 05 May '14

05 May '14

Sharva Pathak's general exam has been RESCHEDULED to Monday, May 12th, 2014 at 2pm in Room 402. Committee members: Vivek Pai (advisor), Kai Li, Mike Freedman Everyone is invited to the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: While many applications may benefit from better control over the network stack, existing options, such as developing a new protocol, changing the kernel, or customizing a user-level TCP stack, are unattractive for many domains. We introduce ModNet, a system to allow modular customization of the networking stack, enabling the development of per-application and per-service behaviors with low developer effort and low system overhead. ModNet introduces a small amount of mechanism into the existing networking stack: enabling interposition, exposing finer-grained network processing status and allowing manipulation of socket buffer content. We demonstrate ModNet’s utility across a range of tasks that exercise fine-grained customization of different parts of the network stack’s behavior. In response to changing connection bandwidth, ModNet modules can adaptively compress data and images. Fine control over network socket buffers allows selective swapping of network data to SSDs, enabling resource-heavy dynamically-generated content applications to handle more throughput. Likewise, manipulating socket buffer content allows video applications to adapt bitrate at a finer granularity with server-side cooperation, reducing rebuffering times and improving playback over purely client-side approaches. All of these modules can operate at scale, often providing gigabits per second of throughput with low performance overheads. Reading list: Books: " Modern Operating Systems", Andrew S. Tanenbaum " Computer Networks : A Systems Approach", Larry L. Peterson and Bruce S. Davie. Papers: "Mach: A New Kernel Foundation For UNIX Development", Mike Accetta, Robert Baron, William Bolosky, David Golub, Richard Rashid, Avadis Tevanian and Michael Young. In Usenix Summer Conference, 1986. "Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management", Dawson R. Engler, M. Frans Kaashoek, and James O’Toole Jr. In SOSP '95. "The Packet Filter: An Efficient Mechanism for User-level Network Code", Jeffrey C. Mogul. In SOSP '87. "Kqueue: A generic and scalable event notification facility", Jonathan Lemon. In Usenix ATC '01. "Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server", Vivek S. Pai, Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel. In Usenix ATC '99. "Implementing Network Protocols at User Level.", Chadramohan A. Thekkath, Thu D. Nguyen, Evelyn Moy and Edward D. Lazowska. In ACM Transactions on Networking '93. "Connection Conditioning: Architecture-Independent Support for Simple, Robust Servers", KyoungSoo Park and Vivek S. Pai. In NSDI '06. "Netmap: a novel framework for fast packet I/O", Luigi Rizzo. In Usenix ATC '12. "MegaPipe: A New Programming Interface for Scalable Network I/O", Sangjin Han, Scott Marshall, Byung-Gon Chun and Sylvia Ratnasamy. In OSDI '12. "A toolkit for user-level file systems", David Mazières. In Usenix ATC '01.

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David Shue FPO Monday, May 12, 2014 at 1pm in 402 Computer Science
by Nicki Gotsis 05 May '14

05 May '14

David Shue will present his FPO on Monday, May 12, 2014 at 1pm in 402 Computer Science. The members of his committee are Michael Freedman, advisor; Jennifer Rexford and Anees Shaikh (Google), readers; and Vivek Pai and Margaret Martonosi, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Multi-tenant Resource Allocation For Shared Cloud Storage" is available in room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. Nicki Gotsis Graduate Coordinator Room 310, Computer Science (609) 258-5387 ngotsis(a)cs.princeton.edu

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Speaker: Thomas Dreibholz, Thursday May 8 at 3pm in 301
by Andy Bavier 05 May '14

05 May '14

Everyone is invited to attend this talk. Thomas Dreibholz (Simula Research Laboratory) Thursday, May 8, 3pm Computer Science 301 The NorNet Testbed for Multi-Homed Systems -- Introduction and Status Multi-homing denotes the simultaneous connection of endpoints to multiple Internet Service Providers (ISP). That is, such endpoints should remain reachable even when some of the ISPs have problems. Besides the redundancy aspect, multi-homing can also make load sharing by multi-path transport possible, i.e. increasing the application throughput by utilizing multiple paths simultaneously. The growing need for and deployment of multi-homed applications makes large-scale testing and evaluation in realistic Internet setups necessary. For instance, different paths can have very different characteristics with regard to bandwidth, packet loss rate, congestion, delay and jitter. Therefore, the Simula Research Laboratory is building up the NorNet testbed, which is an open platform for such experiments. NorNet consists of two parts, the wireless part NorNet Edge as well as the wired part NorNet Core, providing researchers the possibility to use programmable, multi-homed nodes at different locations in Norway as well as at some international sites. This talk gives an overview over the NorNet testbed, with a special focus on the usage of the PlanetLab/Linux Containers-based software that is used to run NorNet Core. NorNet homepage: https://www.nntb.no

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Scott Erickson will present his MSE thesis talk on Thursday, May 8th, 2014 at 1:30pm in room 302
by Nicki Gotsis 05 May '14

05 May '14

Scott Erickson will present his MSE thesis talk on Thursday, May 8th, 2014 at 1:30pm in room 302 of the Computer Science Building. His committee is: Michael Freedman, adviser and Vivek Pai as reader. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. --------------------------- Abstract: There are an increasing number of users consuming more and more data through mobile apps on their carrier’s metered 3G and 4G connections. However, a certain percentage of this traffic is duplicated, and is thus wasteful. If this duplicated data were to be eliminated, consumers could use their data connections more comfortably while lightening the load on the network. This work presents a system that deduplicates HTTP traffic, and experimentally evaluates its performance. Nicki Gotsis Graduate Coordinator Room 310, Computer Science (609) 258-5387 ngotsis(a)cs.princeton.edu

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Gordon Stewart: Pre-FPO talk announcement (5/12 at 9:30 in Room 302)
by Nicki Gotsis 05 May '14

05 May '14

Gordon Stewart will present his Pre-FPO on Monday, May 12 at 9:30am in Room 302 in the Computer Science Building. The members of his committee are: Andrew Appel (advisor); Zhong Shao and David Walker (readers); David August and Sharad Malik (nonreaders). Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk title and abstract follow below: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Title: Verified Separate Compilation for C ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Verified separate compilation is the process of independently translating a program's components in a way that preserves correctness of the program as a whole. In the most general case, a verified separate compiler supports heterogeneous source programs, in which some modules are in C or another high-level language while others are written in a lower-level language like x86 assembly, as is common in systems software such as operating systems. A verified separate compiler in this context is one that preserves the behavior of the entire source program, comprising the C and x86 modules, when the C code is compiled to assembly. Separate compilation has numerous practical benefits. It speeds up development cycles by enabling re-compilation of just those source modules that have been edited by the programmer. It enables shared libraries---separately compiled modules mapped at runtime into the virtual address spaces of multiple processes. It promotes modularity in the large, by enabling programmers to write applications containing logically distinct translation units, each composed at a different level of abstraction or even in a different programming language altogether. But perhaps equally important are applications of verified separate compilers to /modular verification/, the act of reasoning independently about each module in a program (with respect to specifications of the other modules) in order to prove whole program correctness. A modular verification approach means the programmer can break the task of proving correctness of large programs into smaller, more manageable steps: First provide specifications of the modules that form the program, then prove independently of each module that the module meets its specification. When modules proved correct in this way are compiled by a semantics-preserving separate compiler, one gets not only that each module is translated correctly to assembly and then machine code, but also that the target whole program---linked and running on the machine---has the same behavior as the source whole program about which the programmer proved a correctness specification. The result is an end-to-end system: Whole program properties proved modularly at the source level are true also of the whole program that results from separate compilation and linking. In this thesis, I present techniques that address the verified separate compilation problem in the context of C-like languages. My work extends state-of-the-art verified compilers for C such as CompCert (http://compcert.inria.fr/)---the correctness proof of which is currently limited to whole programs---to support verified separate compilation. Major results of the thesis are the proof of a separate compilation theorem for C and the novel semantics of inter-language linking on which the statement of the separate compilation theorem depends. I also address applications to verified compilation of coarse-grained concurrent programs, revealing surprising connections between separate compilation and concurrency in the process. To validate the separate compilation result, I show that it supports modular verification of source programs in the Verified Software Toolchain program logic for C (http://vst.cs.princeton.edu/).

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Adrian Soviani's FPO has been rescheduled to 12pm on Friday May 2
by Joseph Crouthamel 02 May '14

02 May '14

Adrian Soviani's FPO has been rescheduled to 12pm on Friday May 2 in Room 402. The members of his committee are: JP Singh, advisor; Kai Li and David August, readers; Brian Kernighan and Andrea LaPaugh, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "A Hybrid SPMD - Coarse Grain Dataflow Parallel Programming Model" is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. Nicki Gotsis Graduate Coordinator Room 310, Computer Science (609)258-5387 ngotsis(a)cs.princeton.edu

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B Hristov general exam
by Melissa M. Lawson 29 Apr '14

29 Apr '14

Borislav Hristov will present his research seminar/general exam on Tuesday May 6 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Mona Singh (advisor), Olga Troyanskaya, and Tom Funkhouser. 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 ----- Abstract: The improvement and the decreased cost of next generation DNA sequencing have enabled genome wide measurements in large numbers of individuals. This allows researchers to compare the genome variations in both healthy and sick individuals in order to help uncover the genetic underpinnings of human disease. However, complex diseases are caused by a combination of genetic perturbations- often the same phenotypic outcome (a disease case) can result from a different set of possible mutations, possibly in different loci. Cancer is a disease which exhibits such a great genetic heterogeneity. This makes studying it and identifying causal variants extremely difficult. We combine knowledge of biological interactions with genome sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas to perform an integrated analysis of several types of cancer. Our hypothesis is that even though different patients could have entirely disjoint sets of somatic variants, these variants disturb similar cell processes and hence are closely connected in the biological network. We phrase the problem precisely in mathematical terms and devise an efficient greedy heuristic to solve it. We use a robust framework of cross validation tests to demonstrate the soundness of our approach. We are able to recover well known cancer genes as well as to highlight possible new ones. We show that our method yields both efficient and biologically relevant results. Reading List: Yona, Golan. Introduction to Computational Proteomics . CRC Press, 2011. Chapters: 1-7, 10, 13.2 Dand, Nick, et al. "BioGranat-IG: a network analysis tool to suggest mechanisms of genetic heterogeneity from exome-sequencing data." Bioinformatics 29.6 (2013): 733-741. Vandin, Fabio, Eli Upfal, and Benjamin J. Raphael. "Algorithms for detecting significantly mutated pathways in cancer." Journal of Computational Biology 18.3 (2011): 507-522. Ulitsky, Igor, et al. "DEGAS: de novo discovery of dysregulated pathways in human diseases." PLoS One 5.10 (2010): e13367. Navlakha, Saket, and Carl Kingsford. "The power of protein interaction networks for associating genes with diseases." Bioinformatics 26.8 (2010): 1057-1063. Wang, Peggy I., and Edward M. Marcotte. "It's the machine that matters: Predicting gene function and phenotype from protein networks." Journal of proteomics 73.11 (2010): 2277-2289. Gosline, Sara JC, et al. "SAMNet: a network-based approach to integrate multi-dimensional high throughput datasets." Integrative Biology 4.11 (2012): 1415-1427. Lee, Insuk, et al. "Prioritizing candidate disease genes by network-based boosting of genome-wide association data." Genome research 21.7 (2011): 1109-1121. Hofree, Matan, et al. "Network-based stratification of tumor mutations." Nature methods (2013). Jiang, Peng, and Mona Singh. "SPICi: a fast clustering algorithm for large biological networks." Bioinformatics 26.8 (2010): 1105-1111.

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Colloquium speaker Junfeng Yang, Monday April 28, 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 28 Apr '14

28 Apr '14

Determinism Is Not Enough: Making Parallel Programs Reliable with Stable Multithreading Junfeng Yang, Columbia University Monday, April 28, 4:30pm Computer Science 105 Our accelerating computational demand and the rise of multicore hardware have made parallel programs, especially shared-memory multithreaded programs, increasingly pervasive and critical. Yet, these programs remain extremely difﬁcult to write, test, analyze, debug, and verify. Conventional wisdom has attributed these difﬁculties to nondeterminism (i.e., repeated executions of the same program on the same input may show different behaviors), and researchers have recently dedicated much effort to bringing determinism into multithreading. In this talk, I argue that determinism is not as useful as commonly perceived: it is neither sufﬁcient nor necessary for reliability. We present our view on why multithreaded programs are difﬁcult to get right, describe a promising approach we call stable multithreading to dramatically improve reliability, and summarize our last four years’ research on building and applying stable multithreading systems. Junfeng Yang 's research ( www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng ) centers on making reliable and secure systems. He earned his PhD at Stanford, where he created eXplode, a general, lightweight system for effectively finding storage system errors. This work has led to an OSDI '04 best paper, numerous bug fixes to real systems such as the Linux kernel, and a featured article in Linux Weekly news. He worked at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley from 2007-2008, extending eXplode to check production distributed systems. MoDist, the resultant system, is being transferred to Microsoft product groups. He's now co-directing the Software Systems Lab ( ssl.cs.columbia.edu ) at Columbia University, where his recent work on making reliable parallel programs---the Tern/Peregrine/Parrot stable multithreading systems---was featured in CACM, ACM Tech News, The Register, and many other sites. He won Sloan and AFOSR YIP both in 2012; and NSF CAREER in 2011.

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M Jayakumar MSE thesis talk
by Melissa M. Lawson 25 Apr '14

25 Apr '14

Madhu Jayakumar will present her MSE thesis talk on Wednesday April 30 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of her committee are Vivek Pai (advisor) and Kai Li. Everyone is invited to attend her talk. Her abstract follows below. -------------------------- Network traffic to mobile devices has exponentially increased over the past five years and is expected to continue growing. As these devices become more computationally powerful, mobile users have started to consume more and more traffic including high-definition video and audio. As wireless networks are more bandwidth-constrained, it is useful to understand and develop techniques to reduce mobile data traffic. We observed traffic from some of the most frequently visited mobile websites, and quantify the different types of traffic in terms of content type, cacheability and compression characteristics. Our analysis revealed redundancies across requests on repeat visits and we evaluate the effectiveness of using chunking and Rabin fingerprinting to deduplicate this traffic. Finally, we offer two system implementations and associated protocols that can be used for a content-based caching system which optimizes mobile web traffic by decreasing bandwidth.

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X Chen FPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 25 Apr '14

25 Apr '14

Xiaobai Chen will present his FPO on Monday May 5 at 4:15 in Room 302 (note room!). The members of his committee are: Tom Funkhouser, advisor; Szymon Rusinkiewicz and Dan Goldman (Adobe), readers; Adam Finkelstein and David Dobkin, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Shape Analysis with Crowdsourced Data" is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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