Cornell Systems Lunch

CS 754 Spring 2005
Friday 12PM, Rhodes 655

E. Gün Sirer and Andrew Myers


Sponsored by the Information Assurance Institute (IAI),
Computing and Information Science, Cornell

The Systems Lunch is a seminar for discussing recent, interesting papers in the systems area, broadly defined to span operating systems, distributed systems, networking, architecture, databases, and programming languages. The goal is to foster technical discussions among the Cornell systems research community. We meet once a week on Fridays at noon in Rhodes 655.

The systems lunch is open to all Cornell students interested in systems. First-year graduate students are especially welcome. Student participants are expected to sign up for CS 754, Systems Research Seminar, for one credit.

Past semesters:

Fall 07
Spring 07
Fall 06
Spring 06
Fall 05
Spring 05
Fall 04
Spring 04
Fall 03
Spring 03
Fall 02
Spring 02
Fall 01

Date Paper Presenter
January 28 An Algebraic Approach to Practical and Scalable Overlay Network Monitoring
Yan Chen, David Bindel, Hanhee Song, Randy H. Katz
SIGCOMM 2004 		Mahesh
February 04 The Feasibility of Supporting Large-Scale Live Streaming Applications with Dynamic Application End-Points
Kunwadee Sripanidkulchai, Aditya Ganjam, Bruce Maggs, Hui Zhang
SIGCOMM 2004 		Vidya
February 11 Backtracking Intrusions
Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen
SOSP 2003 		Manpreet Singh
February 18 Improving the reliability of Internet paths with one-hop source routing
K. Gummadi, Madhyastha, Gribble, Levy, Wetherall
OSDI 2004 		Bernard
February 25 IPTPS 2005, no meeting.
March 03 Prospective visit day, no meeting.
March 10 A Gossip-based Membership Protocol
André Allavena, Al Demers, John Hopcroft.
André
March 17 Enhancing server availability and security through failure-oblivious computing
Rinard, Cadar, Dumitran, Roy, Leu, Beebee, Jr.
OSDI 2004
We will meet in the Systems Lab (Upson 331) today 		Tudor
March 24 Spring break, no meeting.
March 31 ACSU Faculty lunch, no meeting.
April 07 Configuration Debugging as Search: Finding the Needle in the Haystack
Whitaker, Cox, Gribble
OSDI 2004 		Vivek
April 14 Using model checking to find serious file system errors
Yang, Twohey, Engler, Musuvathi
OSDI 2004 		Maya
April 21 Design and Implementation of a Single System Image Operating System for Ad Hoc Networks
Hongzhou Liu, Tom Roeder, Kevin Walsh, Rimon Barr, Emin Gun Sirer
Mobisys 2005 		Hongzhou Liu
April 29 Trusted Computing (an IBM Research view)
It is still too early to say, but it wouldn't surprise me if the phrase Trusted Computing ends up among the top 10 hype phrases of this decade. While seemingly intuitive, everyone knows what trusted computing means to them, it is hard to develop set of common features and guarantees that have a clear value proposition. In this talk I will present an IBM research view of trusted computing which is obviously server, service and open source centric. I will explain the technical details of the work we are doing at IBM research around Trusted Computing Group (TCG) standards (attestion, virtual TPMs) and secure virtualization (sHype and Xen). I will also discuss some of the inherent TCG limitations and promising new directions that resulted from collaboration with Adrian Perrig (CMU) and his students.

Leendert van Doorn is a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center where he is the senior manager of the secure systems and tools departments. He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam where he worked on the distributed operating system Amoeba and designed and implemented an extensible operating system called Paramecium. Nowadays his main interest is in system security. Currently he is working on secure hypervisors and trusted computing. His role is mainly that of chief architect but he also likes to get his hands dirty and work on the Intel VMX port for Xen. Occasionally he still works on his former projects such as the physically secure coprocessor and wireless security auditing tools. He spends most of his time at Watson but is known to occasionally find refuge in his office at CMU.
Leendert van Doorn 		Leendert van Doorn (IBM / CMU)
May 05 Automated Worm Fingerprinting
Singh, Estan, Varghese, Savage
OSDI 2004 		Biswanath
June 03 Internet Outbreaks: Epidemiology and Defenses
Note that the talk will start at 12:30

In the time it takes to read this sentence, the 2003 Slammer worm was able to probe over a hundred million Internet hosts. Worse, this attack was both trivial and unsophisticated. Unfortunately, the combination of widespread software homogeneity and unrestricted connectivity has created "perfect storm" conditions for such Internet outbreaks. This talk will survey the concrete threats posed by epidemic attacks, the engineering requirements for meaningful defenses, and the technologies being developed to protect future systems.
Stefan Savage (UCSD)
June 06 Locality Aware Network Solutions
11:00-noon, Upson 5130


 Dahlia Malkhi (MSR / Hebrew University)
June 06 Gossip-based Peer Sampling
1:00-2:00pm, Upson 5130

Gossip-based systems have since long played an important role in large-scale distributed settings. At the heart of all of the associated protocols lies a fundamental distributed abstraction: the peer sampling service. The aim of this service is to provide every node with peers to exchange information with. Many analytical studies (often implicitly) assume that the peers to send gossip messages to are selected uniformly at random from the set of all nodes. In principle, this requires each node to know all other nodes. In practice, however, nodes maintain only a partial view on the entire set of nodes, and exchange this view with their peers in order to enable uniform random selection.

In this talk I will present a framework to implement reliable and efficient peer sampling services. The framework can closely capture existing approaches and makes it easy to introduce new ones. We use this framework to explore and compare several implementations. Through experimental analysis, we show that all of them lead to different peer sampling services, many of which appear to provide uniform random sampling per node, but at the same time are very different in the way they affect overall application behavior.
Maarten van Steen (Vrije Universiteit)
June 06
3:00-4:00pm, Upson 5130


 Liuba Shrira (Brandeis University)
June 08
1:30 pm in 5130 Upson

Topology is key to understanding robustness and function in many different contexts including social networks, biological systems, technological networks and P2P overlays. I will motivate and define the "topology management problem" in overlay networks. I will then present a simple generic protocol, T-Man, for constructing and maintaining large classes of topologies in a fully decentralized manner. T-Man draws inspiration from "cell adhesion" that is used to explain pattern formation in biological development and regeneration. T-Man is self- organizing, scalable, robust and extremely fast. It can be used directly to satisfy application topology needs on-demand or it can be used to recover or bootstrap other protocols such as DHTs.

This is joint work with my colleagues Mark Jelasity and Alberto Montresor of Bologna and has been performed in the context of Project BISON financed by the European Union under the IST-FET Programme.
Ozalp Babaoglu (University of Bologna)