GMU Software Engineering Seminar Series

***********************************************

Date: Thur, 2/25/2010

Time: 12 – 1pm

Location: 4201 Engineering

***********************************************

Title: Self-Assembling Distributed Internet Software

Speaker: Yuriy Brun

Abstract

Nature uses decentralized mechanisms that can often scale and self-adapt better than human-engineered ones. Certain types of software systems share requirement and resource properties with nature and may benefit from nature-inspired mechanisms. For example, large, highly distributed Internet systems resemble biological bodies with billions of self-contained cells, coordinating to achieve high-level tasks. For such systems, self-management and self-adaptation are critical.

In this talk, I will present the tile style: a nature-inspired architectural style for distributing computation onto large, insecure, public networks, such as the Internet. I will demonstrate how tile-style systems can solve important real-world problems, such as protein folding, image recognition, and resource allocation, while providing guarantees on (1) privacy preservation: tile-style systems preserve the privacy of the algorithm and data, (2) fault and attack tolerance: tile-style systems can tolerate faulty and malicious nodes, and (3) scalability: tile-style systems scale well to leverage the size of the public network to accelerate the computation. In addition to a formal theoretical evaluation, I will discuss an empirical evaluation of a prototype tile-style system deployed on the globally distributed PlanetLab. The analysis shows that problems requiring privacy-preservation can be solved using the tile style orders of magnitude faster than using today's state-of-the-art alternatives.

Bio
Yuriy Brun is an NSF CRA postdoctoral Computing Innovation Fellow at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2008 from the University of Southern California, as an Andrew Viterbi Fellow, and his M.Eng. degree in 2003 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral research was a finalist in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition in 2008. Brun’s research interests are in the area of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing software systems. His work combines theoretical computer science approaches to modeling nature-inspired algorithms and software engineering approaches to leveraging those algorithms to build systems.