Research topics, projects, and half-baked ideas.

As a researcher at AT\&T Labs I have expanded my interestes primarily into the areas of mobile devices, security, and storage. I research storage performance and reliability aspects in two applications: disaster recovery of cloud VMs, and high-volume analytics on streaming data warehouses. I focus on the challenges arising from the power constraints of mobile devices, particularly in the context of security and UMTS network utilization. And I also investigate security and privacy as services provided by thin software layers such as a hypervisor, with applications to cloud infrastructure.

I am the lead author of SnowFlock, a collaboration with the Biocomputing group at the University of Toronto. SnowFlock targets parallel applications in VM-based cloud computing environments. With SnowFlock you can swiftly and efficiently clone your VMs to create Impromptu Clusters, allowing for instantaeous scaling of your set of VMs to tackle on-the-fly parallelism.

Developed VMGL (my page, sysweb project site), a VMM-independent 3D hardware acceleration virtualization solution. VMGL clocks well over 5000 thousand downloads and has a wide user community spanning installations in Xen, VMware server, KVM and VirtualBox VMs.

The Snowbird VM-based application migration project constitutes roughly half of my doctoral dissertation. With Snowbird, applications that alternate between computational and interactive phases are seamlessly migrated, combining the best of remote and local execution.

Collaborated with Lionel Litty and his advisor David Lie in Patagonix, a hypervisor security substrate that is able to identify executing code even if the OS kernel is compromised, allowing the detection and preventing the execution of stealthy malware.

I am a member of the Internet Suspend-Resume project with Satya's group atCarnegie Mellon. Frequently working together with Niraj Tolia.

Conducted some preliminary explorations on ways to characterize, measure and benchmark the interactive performance of systems.

My M.Sc. thesis comprised research on the robustness of simplified simulation models widely used in the evaluation of ad hoc network routing protocols.