School of Computing and Information Sciences
Florida International University
Miami, Florida
Overview
Projects
Schedule
People
Application
Summer 2006
Summer 2007
Summer 2007

Participants

REU Students 2007 Summer 2007 REU students (Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Javier Figueroa, Sean Leslie, Michael McFail, Barbara Morales, Joseph Naps, Alex Orta, Alain Esteva Ramirez, Ricardo Tirado, Ellen Wagner), graduate students and faculty mentors

Name Home Institution Year Mentor
Javier Figueroa Florida International University Junior Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Sean Leslie Florida International University Junior Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Michael McFail Indiana University of Pennsylvania Junior Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Xabriel J Collazo Mojica University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez Junior Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Barbara Morales University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez Junior Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Joseph Naps University of Wisconsin - Madison Junior Dr. Raju Rangaswami
Alexander Orta Florida International University Junior Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Alain Esteva Ramirez Florida International University Junior Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Ricardo Tirado University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez Junior Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Ellen Wagner College of Wooster Sophomore Dr. Raju Rangaswami

Activities

Research and Education:

Dates Activities Coordinator(s)
May 21 - May 21
  • Welcome
  • Tour of School and University Facilities
  • Presentation - Introduction to Autonomic Computing
  • Presentation - What is Research?
  • Assignment of Projects
Dr. Milani
and
Dr. Li
May 27 Start of Research Activities Mentors
June 7 Progress Presentation 1 Dr. Milani
June 28 Progress Presentation 2 Dr. Milani
July 20 Progress Presentation 3 Dr. Milani
August 10 Final Project Presentation Dr. Milani

Other Activities:

Dates Activities Coordinator(s)
Regularly Visit to Bowling Alley  
  Visit to Coconut Grove Dr. Milani
June 9 Snorkeling Trip Drs. Milani and Rangaswami
July 4 Independence Day Party Dr. Clarke
August 5 Barbecue and Pool Party Dr. Milani
August 7 South Beach Trip Dr. Clarke

Projects

  • Title: UPGRAID: Usage-based stripe replicating RAID
  • Participants: Joe Naps, Ellen Wagner, Jorge Guerra (Ph.D. Student), Luis Useche (Ph.D. Student), and Dr. Raju Rangaswami (mentor)
  • Project Description: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) is the standard for large scale, fault-tolerant storage solutions. The various RAID levels combine space and/or performance optimization to meet the needs of the user. In the project, we developed UPGRAID, which can be seen as a new RAID level built upon RAID5. The idea behind UPGRAID is that, by allocating a small amount of disk space for RAID stripe replication, substantial gains can be seen in both reducing response time during normal operation and reducing overall reconstruction time when a drive fails. This decrease is important as reconstruction is the most vulnerable time for a RAID5 system because another disk failure would render the array useless.
  • Presentations: Upgraid-Final-Presentation
  • Publications: Joseph Naps, Ellen Wagner, Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, and Raju Rangaswami, "UPGRAID:Usage-based striPe replicatinG RAID", Under preparation
  • Title: Tools for Testing ABLE Services
  • Participants: Ellen Wagner, Jorge Guerra (Ph.D. Student), Luis Useche (Ph.D. Student), Medha Bhadkamkar (Ph.D. Student), and Dr. Raju Rangaswami (mentor)
  • Project Description: Guaranteeing that systems perform correctly is imperative for system administrators and developers. Therefore there is a need for tools which test all parts and combinations of workloads. Systems handle a series of I/O requests for every action performed by the system, thus in order to assure consistency those I/O requests need to be handled properly. I/O requests can be either a read or a write and it is important that these operations get sent to the correct disk location and do not interfere with or corrupt existing data. Another important task for the tools is to simulate the environment in which the system will be run. System administrators will want to be prepared for the reaction of the system when run at any level of production. This second tool will give feedback as to what it predicts will happen when the user specifies a workload, and then both the developer and system administrator will know how the system will respond to various situations. This project involved building a storage block-layer 'integrity checker' and 'workload generator' test tools that can be used to test new block-layer extensions in the Linux storage stack.
  • Presentations: ABLE-Testing-Final-Presentation
  • Publications: Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, Medha Bhadkamkar, Ellen Wagner*, and Raju Rangaswami, "Active Block Layer Extensions", Under preparation
  • Title: Self-Testing of Autonomic Computing Systems
  • Participants: Barbara Morales, Alain Esteva Ramirez, Tariq King (PhD student), and Dr. Peter J. Clarke (mentor)
  • Project Description: This project built on the work done by the REU 2006 students which involved investigating a component-based mechanism for safe dynamic adaptation that can be used in the validation of autonomic computing systems. The results of the project included: (1) an object-oriented (OO) design for the data structure which can be used to store the component dependencies, and build a safe adaptation graph that would be used to compute the sequence of adaptation steps; (2) a prototype of an autonomic system was developed including components such as orchestrating autonomic managers, touchpoint autonomic managers, and knowledge sources for a job scheduling application which incorporated self-configuration and self-optimization features.
  • Presentations:
  • Publications:
    • Alain E. Ramirez, Barbara Morales and Tariq M. King. A Self-Testing Autonomic Job Scheduler, Proceedings of the 46th ACM Southeast Conference, ACMSE '08. Accepted February 2008.
    • Tariq M. King, Alain E. Ramirez, Barbara Morales and Peter J. Clarke. A Reusable Object-Oriented Design to Support Self-Testable Autonomic Software. The 23rd ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Track on Autonomic Computing. Accepted October 21, 2007.
    • Tariq M. King, Alain E. Ramirez, Rodolfo Cruz, Peter J. Clarke. An Integrated Self-Testing Framework for Autonomic Computing Systems. Journal of Computers. Academy Publisher, 2(9) November 2007, pages 37-49.
  • Title: Self-Configuring Communication Services for a Communication Virtual Machine
  • Participants: Sean Leslie, Ricardo Tirado, Andrew Allen (PhD student) and Dr. Peter J. Clarke (mentor)
  • Project Description: The project investigated how to extend the functionality of a Network Communication Broker (NCB), a layer in the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) that interfaces with the underlying networks, to utilize multiple communication APIs and the dynamic configuration of these APIs in NCB. An extensive review of the following communication APIs was performed: NCB, Skype, Libjingle, Google Talk's C++, Eclipse Communication Framework and Java MSN Messenger Library (JML). The results of the project included: (1) dynamic models (UML activity diagrams) and static models (UML class diagrams) for the self-configuring capability of the NCB. A prototype of the self-configuring NCB was also built.
  • Presentations:
  • Publications:
    • Andrew Allen, Sean Leslie, Ricardo Tirado, Yali Wu and Peter J. Clarke. Self-Configuring User-Centric Communication Services. The 3rd International Conference on Systems (ICONS 2008). Accepted December, 2007.