Distributed and Internet Systems Lab

The DISS Lab, directed by Prof. Xiaobo Zhou, aims to explore in-depth understanding of distributed and Internet computing systems and services, and develop innovative information technologies. The research was supported in part by funding from National Science Foundation, Army Medical Research, and Air Force Research Lab.

Announcement

As the sole PI, Prof. Zhou secured a NSF 3-year research grant for a project on resource allocation optimization for service quality control on multi-tier server clusters.

People

Faculty

• Prof. Xiaobo Zhou

Graduate Students

• Palden Lama, PhD student, 2008 - present
• Sireesha Dasaraju, PhD student, 2007 - present
• Dennis Ippoliti, PhD student, 2006 - present
• Nadine Sundquist, MS student, 2008 - present
• Sarah Wahl, MS student, 2007 - present
• Caroline Williams, MS student, graduated in 2008
• Humzah Jaffar, MS student, graduated in 2007
• Dennis Ippoliti, MS student, graduated in 2006
• Shu Li, MS student, graduated in 2005

Recent Articles

• Resource Allocation Optimization for Quantitative Service Differentiation on Server Clusters, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Elsevier, 68(9): 1250 - 1262, Sep 2008.
• Hop-count based probabilistic packet dropping: congestion mitigation with loss differentiation, Computer Communications, 30(18): 3859 - 3869, December 2007.
• Resource allocation for session-based two-dimensional service differentiation on e-Commerce servers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 17(8): 838 - 850, August 2006.
• Robust processing rate allocation for proportional slowdown differentiation on Internet servers, IEEE Transactions on Computers, 54(8): 964 - 977, August 2005.
• Harmonic proportional bandwidth allocation and scheduling for service differentiation on streaming servers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 15(9): 835 - 848, September 2004.
• See here for more recent publications.

Sponsored Projects

Resource Allocation Optimization for Quantitative Service Differentiation on Multi-Tier Server Clusters (Sponsor: NSF CNS-0720524, $162,850; Sole PI: Xiaobo Zhou)

Internet services have become an important class of driving applications for scalable and quality aware distributed computing technologies. Service differentiation is to provide different quality levels to satisfy requirements of Internet services while maintaining resource availability. It is demanded due to the diversity of access devices and networks of users, but also because it can enhance the system scalability and dependability of the computing technologies. In this research project, the investigators take an analytical and organized approach to examine resource management techniques for quantitative service differentiation in popular multi-tier server clusters. The broad impact of the research will be on quality control for system scalability and dependability enhancement. This project will help society develop quality aware applications and salable computing technologies for popular Internet services.

GPS-based Tracking Systems for Trauma Patients (Sponsor: Army Medical Research, $222,105; PIs: Terry Boult and Xiaobo Zhou)

This project aims in the design and development of a GPS-based tracking system for tracking the location and coordinating time of events for trauma patients. It adopts ZigBee wireless protocol.

Improving Measurable Performance with QoS-Adaptive Cyber-defense Technologies (Sponsor: Air Force Research Lab, $102,063; PIs: Xiaobo Zhou, Edward Chow, and Marijke Augusteijn)

The past few years have seen significant increase in cyber attacks on the Internet, resulting in degraded confidence and trusts in the use of the Internet and computer systems. The cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated, spreading quicker, and causing more damage. Attacks originally exploited the weakness of individual protocols and systems, but now target the basic infrastructure of the Internet. This project aims in the design of a high confidence software framework that supports the development and dynamic configuration of adaptive intrusion detection and response (IDR) systems.

Intelligent Networks with QoS-Adaptive Bandwidth Control (Sponsor: Air Force Research Lab, $55,476; PIs: Terry Boult and Xiaobo Zhou)

As we are moving to the network-centric century, the importance of effective networking has become critical, and much of that depends on QoS-adaptive bandwidth control. Performance of network-centric services depends on getting the right traffic to the right individual over the right channel with minimal waste. How to provide adaptive network bandwidth control and meet QoS needs of various applications at the same time are significant challenges to today's Internet. This project aims to design a cross-layer bandwidth control framework with the enhanced existing QoS techniques and new QoS techniques.

Content Management in High-Performance I/O Systems(Sponsor: UCCS CRCW award, $4000: Sole PI: Xiaobo Zhou)

Due to the unprecedented scale of the Internet, popular Internet services must be scalable to support up to millions of concurrent client requests reliably, responsively, and economically. These scalability and availability requirements pose great challenges on both processing power and networking communication capacity, and their resource management and capacity planning. The architecture deploys a cluster of networked server nodes that work collectively to keep up with ever-increasing request load and provide scalable Internet services. This project is on resource management, high-performance I/O, and load balancing for data-intensive applications on clustered Internet servers.