Graduate Projects        Back to Home Page

In my first two years, I have worked on different and interesting projects. Primarily I have spent my time working on:

Virtuoso

http://virtuoso.cs.northwestern.edu

Imagine ordering a bunch of machines (or even a cluster) from a website and just start using them with a single click, within your browser! Virtuoso aims to leverage Virtual Machines and the Grid Infrastructure to provide a new abstraction for computing. No physical setup/configuration/space hassles. Our challenge is to design and implement middleware to support such a vision. I am working on automated application inference, which can automatically figure out the network/computational needs of a distributed applications and then automatically adapt the underlying network and virtual machine placement to optimize performance and cost for the user as well as the providers. We have demonstrated that we can significantly boost application performance without any user intervention.

 
Publications
  • Ashish Gupta, Ananth Sundararaj, Marcia Zangrilli, Peter Dinda, Bruce B. Lowekamp, Free Network Measurement For Adaptive Virtualized Distributed Computing, Under submission
  • A. Sundararaj, A. Gupta, P. Dinda, Increasing Application Performance in Virtual Environments through Run-time Inference and Adaptation, Proceedings of IEEE High Performance Distributed Computing, 2005 pdf
  • A. Sundararaj, A. Gupta, P. Dinda, Dynamic Topology Adaptation of Virtual Networks of Virtual Machines, Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Run-time Systems for Scalable Computers, Houston, 2004 pdf
  • A. Gupta, P. Dinda, Inferring the Topology and Traffic Load of Parallel Programs Running In a Virtual Machine Environment, Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Job Scheduling Policies for Parallel Processing, June, 2004 pdf

Talks

  • Dynamic Topology Adaptation of Virtual Networks of Virtual Machines, Given at Houston, Texas LCR'04  PPT
  • Inferring the Topology and Traffic Load of Parallel Programs Running In a Virtual Machine Environment, Given at Colombia University, NY, JSSPS'04  PPT

Magnolia : DHT Architecture for keyword-based search

The goal of this project is to design a DHT architecture from the ground up which provides the flexibility of keyword search while providing low and bounded performance, effective load balance and resilient search at the same time, for very large scale P2P networks with high transience.

This is an ongoing work.

 

Publications

Download current poster (NSDI 2005, Boston) and abstract:  abstract   POSTER (3ft x 4ft)

Current Technical Report (ongoing work) PDF

Understanding User Comfort with Resource Borrowing

http://comfort.cs.northwestern.edu

How much of CPU, Memory and disk can be borrow (for useful computation like Folding@Home or Google Compute) from a typical machine without irritating the user ? Our results suggest that more aggressive resource usage is possible, not just in screen saver mode, but all the time. This has many other interesting applications.. The results of our work could be applied in many different ways:

  • to enable applications like  SETI@HOME and Folding@HOME to borrow resources more aggressively without invading users’ comfort zone,
  • understanding resource requirements for several virtual machines located on a single host so that they feel like full machines,
  • inspire design of new interactivity-aware scheduling algorithms,
  • understand  how to provide cheaper computing while ensuring user satisfaction
  • and in general, to make computer systems less annoying to users !
Publications

 A. Gupta, B. Lin, P. Dinda, Measuring And Understanding User Comfort With Resource Borrowing, Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2004) pdf

A. Gupta, B. Lin, and P. Dinda, A Framework and Toolkit for Understanding User Comfort with Resource Borrowing, Technical Report NWU-CS-04-28, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, February, 2004 pdf

Talks

Measuring And Understanding User Comfort With Resource Borrowing, Given at HPDC 2004, Honolulu,Hawaii PPT


Sketch-Based Changed Detection for Very high speed traffic

http://list.cs.northwestern.edu/graid.html

How do we find anomalies in very high-speed traffic streams (10-20 Gbps links) in real-time ? In this project, we  propose algorithms to  detect  heavy change in  network traffic without  the need of  any off line analysis of traffic.  These algorithms are based on a  useful  data structure , the k-ary sketch.
Publications
  • Robert Schweller, Yan Chen, Elliot Parsons, Ashish Gupta, Gokhan Memik and Yin Zhang, Reverse Hashing for Sketch-based Change Detection on High-speed Networks, Under submission
  • Robert Schweller, Ashish Gupta, Elliot Parsons, Yan Chen, Reverse Hashing for Sketch-based Change Detection, In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, October 2004, short paper version pdf
  • Robert Schweller, Yan Chen, Elliot Parsons, Ashish Gupta, Gokhan Memik, Yin Zhang, Reverse Hashing for Sketch-based Change Detection on High-speed Networks, Tech Report, NWU-CS-2004-45. pdf
    Talks

    Reverse Hashing for Sketch Based Change Detection in High Speed Networks, Given at IMC 2004, Sicily, Italy  PPT

Fast Resource Information Dissemination in a P2P Network with Gossip Schemes

The goal of this project is to make the various characteristics of a P2P system readily available to P2P applications by building an efficient P2P Monitoring Service using Gossip communications, helping them to exploit the P2P system in an intelligent way.

Done as a part of the Advanced Operating Systems course


Publications
  • Ashish Gupta, Ankit Mohan, Ananth Sundararaj, Fabian Bustamante, Fast Resource Information Dissemination in a P2P Network, Tech Report , Northwestern University, March 2003 pdf