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.