[talks] M Golightly general exam

Melissa Lawson mml at CS.Princeton.EDU
Tue May 12 09:11:32 EDT 2009


Michael Golightly will present his research seminar/general exam on Friday May 15 
at 10AM in Room 302 (note room).  The members of his committee are:  Vivek Pai, 
advisor, Larry Peterson, and Jen Rexford.  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.
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Abstract:

The PlanetLab global network testbed has grown to consist of over 1000  
globally distributed nodes that run hundreds of research experiments  
concurrently, placing demands on its infrastructure that single- 
experiment testbeds do not face. While it is widely used in the  
networking community, very little research has examined the behavior  
of PlanetLab itself, particularly in the areas of workload and  
capacity analysis. In light of the number of papers and proposals  
devoted to resource allocation strategies, auction mechanisms, and  
testbed fairness,  this lack of data is particularly surprising. In  
order to support continued successful growth of PlanetLab, and to help  
in planning future testbeds such as GENI, a detailed understanding of  
how the system is being used is essential.

Toward this goal, our work presents a detailed analysis of both the  
current testbed state as well as some historical analysis using data  
provided by CoMon, a monitoring service for PlanetLab. We examine node- 
level behavior as well as experiment-centric behavior to understand  
how the system and its components are used in practice. We identify  
root causes of resource contention and workload imbalance, and offer  
solutions for abatement, finding that targeted investments in  
infrastructure have the potential to substantially alleviate  
contention. Through analyzing resource consumption, provision, and  
disparity, we identify the degree of altruism and selfishness among  
the users and sites that host PlanetLab nodes. Using this information,  
we explore the effectiveness of current policies that aim to provide  
fair sharing of resources. We then explore the appropriateness and  
feasibility of various resource allocation schemes using a data driven  
approach based on observed usage patterns.

Reading List:

[Text Book]

[1]    L. L. Peterson and B. S. Davie. Computer networks: a systems  
approach. Morgan Kaufmann, Amsterdam, 4th ed edition, 2007.

[Papers]

[2]    N. Spring, L. Peterson, A. Bavier, and V. Pai. Using planetlab  
for network research: myths, realities, and best practices. SIGOPS  
Oper. Syst. Rev., 40(1):17-24, 2006.

[3]    B. Chun and A. Vahdat. Workload and failure characterization on  
a large-scale federated testbed. Technical Report IRB-TR-03-040, Intel  
Research Berkeley, Nov. 2003.

[4]    K. Park and V. S. Pai. Comon: a mostly-scalable monitoring  
system for planetlab. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev., 40(1):65-74, 2006.

[5]    S. Bhatia, A. Kumar, M. Fiuczynski, and L. Peterson.  
Lightweight, high-resolution monitoring for troubleshooting production  
systems. In 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and  
Implementation (OSDI 2008), December 2008.

[6]    J. Shneidman, C. Ng, D. C. Parkes, A. AuYoung, A. C. Snoeren,  
A. Vahdat, and B. Chun. Why markets could (but don't currently) solve  
resource allocation problems in systems. In HOTOS'05: Proceedings of  
the 10th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, pages 7-7,  
Berkeley, CA, USA, 2005. USENIX Association.

[7]    D. Oppenheimer, J. Albrecht, D. Patterson, and A. Vahdat.  
Design and implementation tradeoffs for wide-area resource discovery.  
In 14th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed  
Computing, 2005. HPDC-14. Proceedings, pages 113-124, 2005.

[8]    D. Oppenheimer, B. Chun, D. Patterson, A. C. Snoeren, and A.  
Vahdat. Service placement in a shared wide-area platform. In ATEC '06:  
Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX '06 Annual Technical  
Conference, pages 26-26, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2006. USENIX Association.

[9]    Y. Fu, J. Chase, B. Chun, S. Schwab, and A. Vahdat. SHARP: An  
architecture for secure resource peering. In Proceedings of the  
nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, pages 133- 
148. ACM New York, NY, USA, 2003.

[10]    R. Ricci, D. Oppenheimer, J. Lepreau, and A. Vahdat. Lessons  
from resource allocators for large-scale multiuser testbeds. SIGOPS  
Oper. Syst. Rev., 40(1):25-32, 2006.




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