Prescience Lab

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University

Welcome to the Prescience Lab. At the highest level of abstraction, our goal is to learn how to deliver arbitrary amounts of computational power to ordinary people. To us, "ordinary people" implies interactive applications and "arbitrary amounts of computational power" implies distributed computing resources. A distributed interactive application must dynamically adapt its behavior to maintain a consistent, responsive, and pleasurable experience for its users at a reasonable cost.

Our research seeks to answer the following four questions:

  • How do we build adaptive distributed interactive applications effectively?
  • How does the demand for resources in these applications vary over time?
  • How does the supply of resources vary over time?
  • How can we use the adaptation mechanisms exposed by an application to match its resource demand with resource supply?
    • The Prescience Lab is a part of the Northwestern Systems Research Group, which is part of the CES Division of EECS.

    Members

  • Peter A. Dinda, Professor
  • Jack Lange, Ph.D. student
  • J. Scott Miller, Ph.D. student
  • Lei Xia, Ph.D. student
  • Chang Bae, Ph.D. student
  • Stephen Tarzia, Ph.D. student
  • Tim Zwiebel, M.S. student
  • Yuan Tang, visiting scholar

    • Distinguished Former Members

  • Ashish Gupta, (Ph.D., 2008. Now at D.E. Shaw)
  • Bin Lin (Ph.D., 2007. Now at Intel)
  • Ananth Sundararaj (Ph.D., 2006. Now at Microsoft)
  • Dong Lu (Ph.D., 2005. Now at RBC Capital Markets)
  • Dave Huber, Jay Bruins, Sam Rossoff, Brian Cornell, Rachel Gold, Alex Shoykhet, Mike Knop, Andrew Weinrich, Luka Spoljaric, Jeff Kwiat, Jason Skicewicz

    • Current Projects

  • ESP: The Empathic Systems Project
  • V3VEE: An Open Source Virtual Machine Monitor For Modern Architectures
  • Absynth: Sensor Network Programming Systems For Non-experts
  • Virtuoso: Resource Management and Prediction for Distributed Computing Using Virtual Machines
  • Clairvoyance: Resource Measurement and Prediction for Distributed Interactive Applications
  • Peer-to-Peer Systems

    • Completed Projects

  • User Comfort: Understanding User Comfort With Resource Borrowing (Extensions of this work have been folded into Clairvoyance and Virtuoso)
  • URGIS: A Unified Relational Approach to Grid Information Services
  • GA-IDS: Genetic Art For Intrusion Detection
  • Virtualized Audio: Immersive Interactive Audio
  • Minet: A user-level TCP/IP stack
  • Tsunami: Multiresolution Resource Queries and Other Applications of Wavelets to Resource Signals
  • WatchTower: Windows Performance Monitoring and Data Reduction
  • Diffusion: Zero Cost Information Dissemination
  • RTSA: Real-time Scheduling Advisors

    • Publications

    Recent talks and papers can be found under each of the individual projects. Additional talks and additional papers are also available.

    Systems
  • Palacios: An open-source virtual machine monitor for modern architectures
  • RPS: An extensible toolkit for building resource prediction systems. The Running Time Advisor and Real-time Scheduling Advisor codes are also included.
  • Playload: A tool for playing back realistic CPU workloads stored in host load traces.
  • Minet: A user-level network stack.
  • Linux Diffusion: Tools for piggybacking extra information on packets
  • GridG: A generator of computational grids
  • TameParallelTCP: Estimate throughput and impact of parallel TCP flows
  • Virtuoso Tools: VNET, VSched, Wayback and others

    • Data

  • Host Load Trace Archive: About one gigabyte of host load traces.

    • Resources

  • V3VEE Development Environment
  • Sensor Network Equipment
  • Virtuoso Cluster
  • Distributed Optical Testbed (DOT Cluster)
  • PlanetLab
  • VLab (for systems education)

    • Mailing List

    To join the mailing list, send a message with the body "subscribe plab-list youremail" to majordomo@cs.northwestern.edu