Gokul Soundararajan
I am a researcher in NetApp Advanced Technology Group. I obtained my PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto. My research interests cover a broad range but are mainly centered around the design and implementation of automatic resource management in servers. I currently work on techniques to improve the efficiency and management of dynamic data centers. For my dissertation, I developed novel techniques to improve performance and the manageability of multi-tenant shared data centers. Other projects I have worked on include Griffin, a system to improve the lifetimes of SSDs, and a database provisioning system. The quickest way to contact me is by emailing me at gokul[at]eecg.toronto.edu.
Research
In order to reduce the costs of ownership, large service providers now run many concurrent applications and efficiently multiplex their requests over existing hardware resources. As a result, server boxes may be dynamically allocated to applications from a shared resource pool and several concurrent applications may run on the same physical server. I am studying into methods into efficiently allocating resources to multiple applications sharing a cluster of servers.
Publications
2013
- Model Ensemble Tools for Self-Management in Data Centers. In 8th International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB 2013), Brisbane, Australia, April 2013. [PDF] [Panel]
- Warming up Storage-level Caches with Bonfire. In 11th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'13), San Jose, CA, Feb 2013. [PDF][Slides]
- MixApart: De-Coupled Analytics for Shared Storage Servers. In 11th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'13), San Jose, CA, Feb 2013. [PDF][Slides]
2012
- Responding Rapidly to Service Level Violations using Virtual Appliances.In ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 46 Issue 3, December 2012.[PDF]
- MixApart: De-coupled Analytics for Shared Storage Servers.In the Fourth USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage'12), Boston, MA, June 2012. [PDF]
2011
- Italian for Beginners: The Next Steps for SLO-Based Management. In the Third USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage'11), Portland, OR, June 2011. [PDF]
2010
- A Query Language and Runtime Tool for Evaluating Behavior of Multi-tier Servers. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS '10), New York, NY, June 2010. [PDF]
- SLIM: Network Decongestion for Storage Systems. (Poster) In Proceedings of the Eighth USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '10), San Jose, CA, February 2010. [PDF]. Also appears as a workshop paper in Second Workshop on I/O Virtualization (WIOV '10) [PDF]
- Extending SSD Lifetimes with Disk-based Write Caches. To appear in Proceedings of the Eighth USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '10), San Jose, CA, February 2010. [PDF]
2009
- SelfTalk for Dena: Query Language and Runtime Support for Evaluating System Behavior. In 1st Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage'09), Big Sky, Montana, USA, October, 2009. [PDF]
- Dynamic Resource Allocation for Database Servers Running on Virtual Storage. In 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'09), San Francisco, USA, February, 2009. [PDF]
2008
- Towards End-to-End Quality of Service: Controlling I/O Interference in Shared Storage Servers. In 9th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2008), Leuven, Belgium, December, 2008. Awarded Best Paper! [PDF]
- Dynamic Partitioning of the Cache Hierarchy in Shared Data Centers. In 34th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2008), Auckland, New Zealand, August, 2008. [PDF]
- Context-aware Prefetching at the Storage Server. . In 33rd USENIX Technical Conference (USENIX 2008), Boston, Massachusetts, June, 2008. [PDF]
2007
- Adaptive Learning of Metric Correlations for Temperature-Aware Database Provisioning. . In 4th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2007), Jacksonville, Florida, June, 2007. [PDF]
- Outlier Detection for Fine-grained Load Balancing in Database Clusters. In 2nd International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB 2007), Istanbul, Turkey, April, 2007. [PDF]
2006
- Reactive Provisioning of Back-end Databases in Shared Dynamic Content Server Clusters. In ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), Volume 1, Issue 2, November, 2006. [PDF]
- Autonomic Provisioning of Backend Databases in Dynamic Content Web Servers. In IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2006), Dublin, Ireland, June, 2006. [PDF]
- Database Replication Policies for Dynamic Content Applications. In ACM SIGOPS Eurosys 2006, Leuven, Belgium, April, 2006. [PDF]
2005
- Online Data Migration for Autonomic Provisioning of Backend Databases in Dynamic Content Web Servers. In Proceedings of the 2005 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research (CASCON 2005), Toronto, Ontario, October, 2005.
- Transparent Caching with Strong Consistency in Dynamic Content Web Sites. ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2005), Cambridge, MA, June, 2005. [PDF]
- Feedback-based Scheduling for Back-end Databases in Shared Dynamic Content Server Clusters. In IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2005), Seattle, WA, June, 2005. [PDF]
- Using Semantic Information to Improve Transparent Query Caching for Dynamic Content Web Sites. In Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce (DEEC 2005). (Held In conjunction with The IEEE 21st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2005)), Tokyo, Japan, April, 2005. [PDF]