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My research is mostly in the field of distributed systems. Loosely
defined, this encompasses work in operating systems, runtime systems, and
distributed object and database systems. In all cases, our approach is to
identify problems, propose solutions in the form of specific policies and
mechanisms, and then empirically evaluate them. We are systems builders:
very few projects end in analysis or simulation.
The systems that we study often operate in fluid, dynamic
environments. Simply put, my group tries to make systems operate better in
such circumstances. Central to our approach is the notion of building
systems that transparently adapt applications to changing conditions.
UbiOS will provide
versioned, ubiquitous object support for a variety of systems,
including interactive paper-based systems, anytime/anywhere annotation
and blogging, and wide-area file systems.
MoteFS provides fast,
flexible, and secure access to remote files over untrusted wide-area
networks.
As part of this effort, we are developing fine-grained namespace
mechanisms, decomposable credentials, cross-server versioning abstractions,
client-side differencing techniques, and wide-area prefetch algorithms.
The end result of this work should be a file system that performs
significantly better than previous work in wide-area settings.
TerraDir is a distributed
peer-to-peer directory protocol that can be used as the basis for
implementing customized directories for Internet applications. TerraDir is
based upon the twin tenets of scalability and flexibility, and will
scale across multiple dimensions including the number of directory entries,
the number of nodes the directory is distributed across, and available
network, processing, and storage resources.
Older work:
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Saeed Alaei