Research Projects @ Grad School (2008-2013)
Xorbas (XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data)
- Regenerating codes specially designed for data centers are being implemented over Hadoop HDFS
- Based on Facebook's implementation of HDFS-RAID
- About 2x reduction in network utilization and disk I/O during file repairs.
- Advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis.
- Source code available at https://github.com/madiator/HadoopUSC
- Appeared in VLDB 2013.
- Visit the project page.
Network Coding for Vehicular Networks
- Network Coding applied to Vehicular Networks to minimize the delay in content retrieval.
- Obtained theoretical upper bounds on delay and showed regions where Network Coding performs better than naive distribution strategy.
- Simulated on real taxi traces to show the improvement.
- Continued the work at General Motors to test on real vehicles.
- Advised by Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Prof. Alex Dimakis and Dr. Fan Bai.
- Appeared in Infocom-Mini 2012 and journal submission under progress.
VANETSim: A Vehicular Network SimulatorJan 2012 -- Present
- A Java based simulator primarily designed to study coded and uncoded content distribution strategies in vehicular networks.
- The goal is to simulate a city-wide network of vehicles exchanging content with one another.
- Advised by Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari in collaboration with General Motors R&D
Twitter Retweet Dynamics Apr 2010 -- Aug 2011
- Using data collected from Twitter, we showed an interesting trend between the number of retweets received and the probability of retweeting by Twitter users.
- Work was presented at the 2nd Annual Annenberg Symposium and was invited to present again at the 3rd Annual Annenberg Reception.
- Future work involves characterization of Tweets based on their space-time properties, spam detection in Twitter etc.
- Advised by Prof. Antonio Ortega.
Implementation of MapReduce Feb 2010 -- Apr 2010
- Implemented MapReduce (a framework for distributed processing) on USC's High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) cluster consisting of thousands of nodes, as part of a course.
- Used it to study huge network datasets.
- Course (Computer Communications, CS551) advised by Prof. John Heidemann.
Other Projects
- Implementation of Nachos, a software that simulates a small OS, involving process management, memory management, interprocess communication, fault tolerance etc. for a course on Operating Systems.
- Flash Scheduling - proposed and analyzed a new scheduling algorithm in a multi-user communication system with varying number of users (term project for Computer Communications course).