Talk

Sensor networks composed of large numbers of self-organizing embedded devices are an increasingly valuable tool for understanding our world. Deployed networks allow scientists to observe phenomena at a scale and resolution that challenge existing instrumentation.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) establishes routes between the many independently-administered networks that make up the Internet. Over the past two decades there has been exponential growth in the scale and complexity of the Internet.

The internet, a large and distributed system, is not controlled by a single economic entity but rather by multiple agents, each with its own agenda. From this point of view, internet protocols are merely recommendations that agents can choose to ignore if they have anything to gain by doing so.

Many distributed services are hosted at large, shared, geographically diverse data centers, and they use replication to achieve high availability despite the unreachability of an entire data center.

Analysis of multivariate time stamped data, for purposes such as Temporal Knowledge Discovery, Classification and Clustering, presents many challenges.

The difficulty of making changes to the internet architecture has spawned widespread interest in large-scale, "virtualized" testbeds as a place to deploy new services.

I will discuss the problem of building fast, programmable routers. I will present RouteBricks, a high-end router architecture that consists entirely of commodity servers.

Binary tomography -- the process of identifying faulty network links through coordinated end-to-end probes -- is a promising method for detecting failures that the network does not automatically mask (e.g., network "blackholes").

It is notoriously hard to develop dependable distributed systems. This is partly due to the difficulties in foreseeing various corner cases and failure scenarios while the system is running over an asynchronous network.