[talks] Indranil Gupta talk at 12:30pm today, room 402

[Michael J Freedman]

Today, Indranil Gupta from UIUC will be visiting us and speaking at 
Systems Lunch in room 402 (food at 12:00pm, talk at 12:30pm).  The title 
and abstract of his talk is below.

Cheers,
--mike

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Title: Wizards and Fruitflies -- Using Eternal and Ephemeral Overlays
for Monitoring Distributed Systems

Speaker: Indranil Gupta, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer
Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract: Many distributed applications running over emerging
large-scale distributed infrastructures, such as p2p systems,
PlanetLabs and Grids, require the capability to monitor and manage a
large distributed set of nodes at run-time. While many solutions exist
for network and infrastructure-level monitoring, there is a scarcity
of management solutions that work at the level of the distributed
application, e.g., for monitoring node availability, count, top-k
loaded nodes, querying log-files, etc. At the same time, much work has
been done in the community on both persistent overlays such as
distributed hash tables (DHTs), as well as unstructured overlays
(e.g., Gnutella). However, we find that two alternative, unexplored,
and opposing extremes of the design spectrum - eternal and ephemeral
overlays - are better suited to solving the above management tasks.

We present two systems -- AVMON and MON -- that seek to provide to
distributed applications (and deployers) the ability to both monitor
long-term availability histories of nodes in a distributed
application, as well as to query the group of nodes on the fly. AVMON
is a scalable availability monitoring overlay that is resilient to
selfish and colluding nodes. AVMON imbues the concept of an eternally
persistent (hence eternal) overlay, where peering relationships
between nodes, once established, remain forever. Our other system,
called MON, allows instant monitoring and management tasks, using the
novel concept of an on-demand and short-lived (hence ephemeral)
overlay, which survives only for the purpose of an individual
management command. Both AVMON and MON are lightweight and fast in
terms of memory, computation, bandwidth, and response time. Our
mathematical analysis, trace-based simulations, and deployment atop
PlanetLab, all demonstrate the practical performance characteristics
of these two approaches in systems containing hundreds to thousands of
nodes. We touch briefly upon how to use AVMON for building
availability-aware services, the usage of MON in PlanetLab, as well as
on other instances of eternal and ephemeral overlays we have studied.


Speaker Bio: Indranil Gupta is an assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell
University in 2004. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in
2005. His research group DPRG works on distributed protocols and
systems, with applications to large-scale distributed systems such as
peer-to-peer systems and sensor networks. DPRG research is funded by
several NSF grants, including multi-disciplinary ones. For more
information on DPRG, visit http://dprg.cs.uiuc.edu