Past Research

Before starting my PhD, I worked on several research projects at VMware. My primary focus was on improving the performance of restoring checkpointed virtual machines. My work included:

Halite is a new VM checkpointing system for VMware ESXi Server that optimizes for checkpoint restore performance. Halite improves disk efficiency and overall performance during restore by organizing checkpointed memory based on access locality.

Working set restore is a new technique for restoring checkpointed virtual machines that predicts the working set of VM memory pages before checkpointing and prefetches those pages on restore, reducing overhead on the VM. This project included a new metric for measuring VM performance on restore, as well as an implementation of working set restore for VMware Workstation.

I worked on a number of research projects with great people while at MIT as an undergrad and MEng student. Some notable projects that I worked on:

TxCache is a distributed, in-memory, application-level cache with transactional consistency and automated cache invalidations. By using recent snapshots for read-only transactions to optimize cache utilization and eliminate cache invalidation, TxCache provides the same performance benefits as other in-memory caches without violating transactional consistency. I worked on this project with Dan Ports, Austin Clements, Barbara Liskov and Sam Madden

WheelFS is a flexible, wide-area file system that gives applications control over performance trade-offs, but with a standard POSIX interface. My master’s thesis work focused on using prefetching and cooperative caching for efficient file distribution in WheelFS. I was advised by Jeremy Stribling, Robert Morris and Frans Kaashoek.

FreshBreeze is a new multiprocessor architecture designed to support the design of functional programs by providing a single global address space, a no-update, cycle-free heap and fine-grained threading. As an undergraduate, I worked with Prof. Jack Dennis to develop a cycle-accurate simulation of the processor architecture.