Emin Gün Sirer

Extensibility safety and performance in the SPIN operating system

This paper describes the motivation, architecture and performance of SPIN, an extensible operating system. SPIN provides an extension infrastructure, together with a core set of extensible services, that allow applications to safely change the operating systems interface and implementation. Extensions allow an application to specialize the underlying operating system in order to achieve a particular level of performance and functionality. SPIN uses language and link-time mechanisms to inexpensively export fine-grained interfaces to operating system services. Extensions are written in a type safe language, and are dynamically linked into the operating system kernel. This approach offers extensions rapid access to system services, while protecting the operating system code executing within the kernel address space. SPIN and its extensions are written in Modula-3 and run on DEC Alpha workstations.

The design and implementation of a next generation name service for the internet

Name services are critical for mapping logical resource names to physical resources in large-scale distributed systems. The Domain Name System (DNS) used on the Internet, however, is slow, vulnerable to denial of service attacks, and does not support fast updates. These problems stem fundamentally from the structure of the legacy DNS.This paper describes the design and implementation of the Cooperative Domain Name System (CoDoNS), a novel name service, which provides high lookup performance through proactive caching, resilience to denial of service attacks through automatic load-balancing, and fast propagation of updates. CoDoNS derives its scalability, decentralization, self-organization, and failure resilience from peer-to-peer overlays, while it achieves high performance using the Beehive replication framework. Cryptographic delegation, instead of host-based physical delegation, limits potential malfeasance by namespace operators and creates a competitive market for namespace management. Backwards compatibility with existing protocols and wire formats enables CoDoNS to serve as a backup for legacy DNS, as well as a complete replacement. Performance measurements from a real-life deployment of the system in PlanetLab shows that CoDoNS provides fast lookups, automatically reconfigures around faults without manual involvement and thwarts distributed denial of service attacks by promptly redistributing load across nodes.

Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, that is, it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed.

SHARP: a hybrid adaptive routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

A central challenge in ad hoc networks is the design of routing protocols that can adapt their behavior to frequent and rapid changes in the network. The performance of proactive and reactive routing protocols varies with network characteristics, and one protocol may outperform the other in different network conditions. The optimal routing strategy depends on the underlying network topology, rate of change, and traffic pattern, and varies dynamically. This paper introduces the Sharp Hybrid Adaptive Routing Protocol (SHARP), which automatically finds the balance point between proactive and reactive routing by adjusting the degree to which route information is propagated proactively versus the degree to which it needs to be discovered reactively. SHARP enables each node to use a different application-specific performance metric to control the adaptation of the routing layer. This paper describes application-specific protocols built on top of SHARP for minimizing packet overhead, bounding loss rate, and controlling jitter. Simulation studies show that the resulting protocols outperform the purely proactive and purely reactive protocols across a wide range of network characteristics.

Path set selection in mobile ad hoc networks

Topological changes in mobile ad hoc networks frequently render routing paths unusable. Such recurrent path failures have detrimental effects on the network ability to support QoS-driven services. A promising technique for addressing this problem is to use multiple redundant paths between the source and the destination. However while multipath routing algorithms can tolerate network failures well their failure resilience only holds if the paths are selected judiciously. In particular the correlation between the failures of the paths in a redundant path set should be as small as possible. However selecting an optimal path set is an NP-complete problem. Heuristic solutions proposed in the literature are either too complex to be performed in real-time or too ineffective or both. This paper proposes a multipath routing algorithm called Disjoint Pathset Selection Protocol (DPSP) based on a novel heuristic that in nearly linear time on average picks a set of highly reliable paths. The convergence to a highly reliable path set is very fast and the protocol provides flexibility in path selection and routing algorithm. Furthermore DPSP is suitable for real-time execution with nearly no message exchange overhead and with minimal additional storage requirements. This paper presents evidence that multipath routing can mask a substantial number of failures in the network compared to single path routing protocols and that the selection of paths according to DPSP can be beneficial for mobile ad hoc networks since it dramatically reduces the rate of route discoveries.

Client behavior and feed characteristics of RSS, a publish-subscribe system for web micronews

While publish-subscribe systems have attracted much research interest since the last decade, few established benchmarks have emerged, and there has been little characterization of how publish-subscribe systems are used in practice. This paper examines RSS, a newly emerging, widely used publish-subscribe system for Web micronews. Based on a trace study spanning 45 days at a medium-size academic department and periodic polling of approximately 100,000 RSS feeds, we extract characteristics of RSS content and usage. We find that RSS workload resembles the Web in content size and popularity; feeds are typically small (less than 10KB), albeit with a heavy tail, and feed popularity follows a power law distribution. The update rate of RSS feeds is widely distributed; 55% of RSS feeds are updated hourly, while 25% show no updates for several days. And, only small portions of RSS content typically change during an update; 64% of updates involve less than three lines of the RSS content. Overall, this paper presents an analysis of RSS, the first widely deployed publish-subscribe system, and provides insights for the design of next generation publish-subscribe systems.

On the need for system-level support for ad hoc and sensor networks

Ad hoc and sensor networks are an important, emerging niche that is poorly supported by existing operating systems. In this paper, we argue that network-wide energy management is a primary concern in ad hoc networks, and that this functionality is best provided by a systems layer. We are currently designing and implementing a distributed, power-aware, adaptive operating system, called MagnetOS, specifically targeting ad hoc and sensor networks. MagnetOS provides a single system image of a unified Java virtual machine across the nodes that comprise an ad hoc network. By automatically and transparently partitioning applications into components and dynamically placing these components on nodes within the ad hoc network, our system reduces energy consumption, avoids hotspots and increases system longevity. We show that a systems approach to automatic object placement in an ad hoc network can increase system longevity by a factor of four to five.

SPIN —an extensible microkernel for application-specific operating system services

Application domains such as multimedia, databases, and parallel computing, require operating system services with high performance and high functionality. Existing operating systems provide fixed interfaces and implementations to system services and resources. This makes them inappropriate for applications whose resource demands and usage patterns are poorly matched by the services provided. The SPIN operating system enables system services to be defined in an application-specific fashion through an extensible microkernel. It offers applications fine-grained control over a machines logical and physical resources through run-time adaptation of the system to application requirements.

Design and implementation of a distributed virtual machine for networked computers

This paper describes the motivation, architecture and performance of a distributed virtual machine (DVM) for networked computers. DVMs rely on a distributed service architecture to meet the manageability, security and uniformity requirements of large, heterogeneous clusters of networked computers. In a DVM, system services, such as verification, security enforcement, compilation and optimization, are factored out of clients and located on powerful network servers. This partitioning of system functionality reduces resource requirements on network clients, improves site security through physical isolation and increases the manageability of a large and heterogeneous network without sacrificing performance. Our DVM implements the Java virtual machine, runs on x86 and DEC Alpha processors and supports existing Java-enabled clients.

HyperDex: a distributed, searchable key-value store

Distributed key-value stores are now a standard component of high-performance web services and cloud computing applications. While key-value stores offer significant performance and scalability advantages compared to traditional databases, they achieve these properties through a restricted API that limits object retrieval---an object can only be retrieved by the (primary and only) key under which it was inserted. This paper presents HyperDex, a novel distributed key-value store that provides a unique search primitive that enables queries on secondary attributes. The key insight behind HyperDex is the concept of hyperspace hashing in which objects with multiple attributes are mapped into a multidimensional hyperspace. This mapping leads to efficient implementations not only for retrieval by primary key, but also for partially-specified secondary attribute searches and range queries. A novel chaining protocol enables the system to achieve strong consistency, maintain availability and guarantee fault tolerance. An evaluation of the full system shows that HyperDex is 12-13x faster than Cassandra and MongoDB for finding partially specified objects. Additionally, HyperDex achieves 2-4x higher throughput for get/put operations.