Chaithan M Prakash

Sherlock: Under the hood of distributed data stores

- Developed the Sherlock framework which traces a distributed data store's operations and generates a global ordering of interesting events based on the concept of Lamport's logical clock.

- Developed algorithms and implemented tools that operate on these events to generate protocol graphs and automatically infer various properties of the storage system such as - the type of consistency, durability, replication, quorum values etc.

- Used Sherlock's above tool-set to study distributed stores such as OpenStack Swift, Voldemort, HyperDex, Redis etc. The study revealed interesting aspects in a few datastores that have strong implications for people experimenting with them.

Fault injection in the Swift object store

- OpenStack Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object store.

- Developed a fault-injection framework and simulated various inter-node communication faults and local file system faults in Swift and analyzed its behavior in the presence of such faults.

Road condition analysis using GPS and IMU sensors on a smartphone

- Developed an Android application to record various sensor readings while driving.

- Derived heuristics to identify potholes, sloped road segments and intersections from the various sensor readings. Also developed a system to evaluate driving quality relative to these circumstances.