Colloquium - Vahdat

This talk presents SHARP, a distributed resource management framework for Internet-scale server infrastructures. SHARP supports flexible resource peering: it enables distributed and mutually distrustful entities to exchange shares of server time and other global resources in the same manner that ISPs exchange network bandwidth. The cornerstone of SHARP is a secure architecture for representing, validating, and delegating cryptographically protected resource claims across a network of resource managers. SHARP also introduces mechanisms for controlled, accountable oversubscription of resource rights as a fundamental tool for dependable, efficient resource management. We present experimental results from a prototype SHARP implementation in PlanetLab. The results demonstrate the practicality of our approach, the role of pairwise resource peering as a basis for a secure, decentralized barter economy for global PlanetLab resources, and the effectiveness of oversubscription for protecting resource availability in the presence of failures.

Amin Vahdat is an Associate Professor at Duke University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. Vahdat received the NSF CAREER award in 2000, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2003 and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003. His research focuses on system support for highly available and high performance network services. His current projects include: i) PlanetLab, a wide-area testbed for next-generation Internet services, ii) ModelNet, an emulation environment for large-scale distributed systems, iii) overlay construction for application layer multicast and peer-to-peer systems, and iv) the implications of availability as the primary metric for next-generation services.

Hosted by Richard Han.