Research   Course projects    Peace corps   Miscellaneous

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Research

• NeST is one of my main research projects. In short, it is about building flexible commodity storage appliances.
• Here are two technical reports which represent my most recent work:
  • Douglas Thain, John Bent, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H Arpaci-Dusseau, and Miron Livny, "The Architectural Implications of Pipeline and Batch Sharing in Scientific Workloads", Technical Report 1463, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, January 2003.
  • Removed while pending submission.
• I'm affiliated with both the Condor and the WiND research groups.
• Before working on NeST, I developed a log viewer for the Condor group.

Course Projects

Title Course Professor Partners Semester

Building storage appliances for the grid Master's project Miron Livny, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau Spring 2001 In this project, which is essentially my research, I examine how the NeST storage appliance is ideally suited towards the storage needs of grid applications. Available as Postscript, PDF.

Network processors: Guiding design through analysis Architecture Mikko Lipasti Tevfik Kosar, Madhu Seshadri Spring 2001 A survery of the relevant literature, a discussion of network packet collection and the resulting analysis. Available as PDF.

Distributed sorting on a linux cluster Databases David DeWitt Brian Forney, Florentina Popovici Fall 2000 This project was in response to Jim Gray's benchmarking challenge to the database community. After some struggle, we eventually set a new Datamation world record of 0.48 seconds. Will be available soon.

A survey and implementation of loop fusion Compilers Charles Fischer Fall 2000 After a survey of the available literature on loop fusion, I used the Simple-SUIF compiler to implement loop fusion for certain loop types. Subsequent benchmarking verified both the instances in which loop fusion is beneficial and those in which it is detrimental. Available as Postscript, PDF.

An examination of incremental checkpointing in Condor Operating systems Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau Gregory Bronner Spring 2000 The Condor scheduling system checkpoints user jobs in order to allow migration of partially completed computations. By studying real user job checkpoint files, we determined that incremental checkpointing would significantly reduce bandwidth usage. We further measured the overhead of incremental checkpointing and found it insignificant. Available as Postscript, PDF.

Design and implementation of a reliable multicast network Networks Larry Landweber Trey Cain, Brandon Schwartz Fall 1999 For this networking project, we built a reliable multicast network. With multiple threads and a fault tolerant design, our code was extremely robust, easily passing all of the demonstration requirements. The biggest challenges were designing the group management, routing and multicast protocols in order to facilitate the division of labor in such a large-scale project. Available as Postscript, PDF.

Peace corps experience

"A pig-butcher, a spear-fisher, a betel tree climber, a taro gardener and a fluent speaker . . . "

Three days after graduating from Amherst, I boarded a plane for the Republic of Palau. Palau is a tiny Pacific island where I was assigned to a two-year stint as a public school librarian. I developed a computerized card catalogue and circulation system for the tiny village of Melekeok (population ~200). This system was so beneficial to our small library that the Minister of Education sent me to all of the Palaun public school libraries to set it up and train the librarians in its use. A pig-butcher, a spear-fisher, a betel tree climber, a taro gardener and a fluent speaker, I was so well integrated that I was selected by the Peace Corps as a trainer for incoming volunteers.

Miscellaneous experience

• Legal assistant
• Chicken factory lineworker
• Dishwasher
• Camp counselor
• Daycare worker
• College rugby president
• Youth soccer coach