Muthian Sivathanu


    1210 W Dayton Street
    7358 Computer Sciences & Statistics
    Madison WI 53706

    Phone : (608) 262-6623
    muthian@cs.wisc.edu

[   Research   |  Publications   |  Talks   |  Internships   |  Resume   |  About me   ]


Hi! I am a third year Ph.D. student at the Computer Sciences Department of the Universtiy of Wisconsin Madison. I mess around with operating systems for whatever reason.
During summer 2003, I am interning with Google Inc. . Here is my contact over the summer.

Research

I work with Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau .

My research interests span the broad boundaries of operating systems and distributed systems. Of late, I have been focussing on issues related to the design of high-performance, robust storage systems. Most of my current work has been looking at utilizing "smartness" in storage systems in ways that improve their performance, functionality and reliability.

I am currently working on Semantically-smart disk systems, where an intelligent disk tries to infer file system level semantic information by just snooping on the raw stream of block reads and writes beneath a narrow SCSI interface, and then uses this information to implement optimizations and new functionality that were previously impossible to do.  [FAST '03 paper].

Earlier to this, I worked on Scriptable RPC, a framework that enables distributed system services to take advantage of the increasing level of intelligence in system components (be it disk, network interface or memory), resulting in extensible, robust and high-performance distributed systems. [ASPLOS '02 paper]

In the past, I have also worked on a host of projects including distributed file systems for network attached storage, distributed RAID algorithms over network storage and security and anonymity architectures for network storage.

Publications

Semantically-Smart Disk Systems
Muthian Sivathanu , Vijayan Prabhakaran, Florentina Popovici, Timothy Denehy, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau , Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
The Second USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '03)
March 2003 San Francisco, CA

Evolving RPC for Active Storage
Muthian Sivathanu , Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau , Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS - X) , pages 264--276
October 2002 San Jose, CA

Block Asynchronous I/O: A Flexible Infrastructure For User-Level Filesystems
Muthian Sivathanu , Venkateshwaran Venkataramani , Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
The International Conference on High-Performance Computing (HiPC '01)
LNCS 2228 Springer 2001, pages 249--261 December 2001 India

The WiND Filesystem (WFS)
Muthian Sivathanu
Masters' Project Report, University of Wisconsin-Madison
December 2001

Self-determination of Optimal Granularity of Distributed Objects
S.Muthian, S.Swaminathan, R.Muralikrishna, Arul Siromoney, V.Uma Maheswari,
Poster Session, The International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC '99) , December 1999, Calcutta, India

Talks

October 2002: "Evolving RPC for Active Storage", ASPLOS 2002, San Jose
August 2002: "Evolving RPC for Active Storage", Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto (Invited Talk)
August 2002: "Scalable Resource Management for Wide-Area Storage", IBM Almaden (Intern Talk)
August 2001: "Scalable Fault-tolerant Replication in Wide-Area Storage" , HP labs, Palo Alto (Intern Talk)
June 2001: "The WiND Filesystem", HP labs, Palo Alto (Intern Intro Talk)
 

Internships

Summer 2002

IBM  Almaden Research Center , San Jose ( Storage Systems group )
Designed an archicture for scalable, decentralized resource management in wide-area storage.   The architecture,  targeted at wide-area storage service providers,  facilitates, inter alia,  optimal replication of competing client virtual disks, both in terms of the number of replicas and their placement across the globe.   The policies ensure that individual disks take mostly autonomous decisions, while still working towards globally optimal resource allocation.

Summer 2001

Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto (Storage Systems program )
Designed  a protocol for scalable, fault-tolerant wide area replication that permits concurrent conflicting updates from all replicas in a geographically distributed storage system.   The work resulted in a patent disclosure.   A prototype system was built with an iSCSI device driver at the client talking to multiple disks interacting through rpc.

Resume

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About Me

For the customary two-line history info, I was born in 1979 in Chennai (aka Madras), India. I did my schooling in St Johns MHSS, Chennai. A four-year stint at Anna University yielded me a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering. Since August 2000, I have been a graduate student here at UW.

Besides Computer Science, which is my primary interest, I am interested in Law and Business, mainly from the influence of my father, a leading lawyer in India. This also partly explains my interest in choosing Business as my Ph.D. minor.

I have also been taking quite a few fun courses during my stay at UW, including Ice Skating, Swimming and Tennis. In addition, I also play badminton in my spare time.

I like collecting quotes; Here is a collection of quotes I like.