[CSEE-colloq] talk: Killian on Building and Testing Distributed Systems, 1pm Fri 3/2, ITE325, UMBC

[Tim Finin]

                Building and Testing Distributed Systems

                          Dr. Charles Killian
                  Computer Science, Purdue University

               1:00pm Friday, 2 March 2012, ITE325, UMBC

Building distributed systems is particularly difficult because of the
asynchronous, heterogeneous, and failure-prone environment where these
systems must run.  This asynchrony makes verifying the correctness of
systems implementations even more challenging.  Tools for building
distributed systems must often strike a compromise between reducing
programmer effort and increasing system efficiency.  In my research,
we strive to introduce a limited amount of structure and limitations
to implementations to enable a wide range of analysis and development
assistance.  Most prominently, we have built the Mace language and
runtime, which translates a concise, expressive distributed system
specification into a C++ implementation.  The Mace specification
importantly exposes three key pieces of structure: atomic events,
explicit state, and explicit messaging.

With a few additional contextual annotations, we show how we can
support intra-node parallel event processing of these atomic events
while still preserving sequenal event consistency---even using
variably available computing resources distributed across a cluster.
By leveraging these three structural elements, we have further built
tools such as a model checker capable of detecting liveness violations
in systems code, a performance tester, and an automated malicious
protocol tester.  Recent research has also explored applications of
these key structures in legacy software, that has produced a log
analysis tool that can detect performance problems, and a malicious
fault injector that can discover successful performance attacks.  Mace
has been in development since 2004 and has been used to build a wide
variety of Internet-ready distributed systems both by myself and by
researchers at places such as Cornell University, Microsoft Research
(Redmond, Silicon Valley, and Beijing), HP Labs, UCLA, EPFL, and UCSD.
This talk will give an overview of my research, presenting the
execution model and its checker, support for event parallelization,
and our more recent testing tools.


Charles Killian (http://bit.ly/CKillian) is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University.  He received
an NSF CAREER award in 2011, as well as an HP Open Innovation award.
In 2008 he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of California, San Diego under the supervision of Amin Vahdat.  Before
transferring to UCSD in August 2004, he completed his Masters in
Computer Science from Duke University with Amin Vahdat.  His systems
and networking research focuses on building and testing distributed
systems, and bridges this research with software engineering,
security, data mining, and programming languages.  Since 2004 he has
implemented the Mace programming language and runtime, built numerous
distributed systems, and designed MaceMC, the first model checker
capable of finding liveness violations in unmodified systems code and
2007 best paper award at NSDI.  Chip has built many additional tools
and enhancements since then, including performance testing, work on
parallel event processing, automated attack discovery, and data mining
logs to discover performance problems.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information