Events Calendar

Taming the Scale and Costs of (Really) Large Distributed Systems

Talk Title: Taming the Scale and Costs of (Really) Large Distributed SystemsSpeaker: Dr. Harsha V. MadhyasthaHost: Prof. Ramesh GovindanAbstract: Over the last decade, the penetration of broadband Internet access and the commoditization of server hardware have dramatically increased. These trends have resulted in planetary-scale distributed applications that span millions of end-hosts and data centers that house hundreds of thousands of servers. Such large scales make it hard to build and deploy applications. In this talk, I will present simple models of these complex environments that help significantly improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of application deployments.First, I will present iPlane, an information plane designed to serve as the source of path information for all applications on the Internet. iPlane continually measures the Internet from several hundred geographically distributed vantage points to maintain an up-to-date map of the Internet's structure. By applying a structural model of the Internet on the data it gathers, iPlane can accurately predict properties such as latency, loss rate, and bandwidth along the path between arbitrary end-hosts in the Internet thus eliminating the need for measurement by any application. Over 3.5 years of deployment, iPlane has been used at more than 40 institutions, including to improve Google's content distribution network.Second, I will talk about BICMIC, a model that automates the process of determining the cluster configuration best suited to any particular data center application. BICMIC combines abstract representations of the application being deployed and the resources that can be used to construct the cluster to identify how various cluster configuration decisions should be combined to make the deployment cost-effective. Examples of configuration decisions include under-utilization of storage devices, caching of data in SSDs or DRAM, use of low-power CPUs, and separation of storage and compute into separate server farms. Bio: Harsha V. Madhyastha is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Diego. He previously received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from theUniversity of Washington and his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, all in Computer Science and Engineering. He has been a
recipient of the Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference. His research interests span all aspects of distributed and networked systems.

Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Front Desk