Dan Williams
4104 Upson Hall
Computer Science Department
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
djwill@cs.cornell.edu
About Me
I graduated! My Cornell Ph.D. was conferred in January 2013. From June 2010 onwards, I'd been on an extended internship at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Now I am a Research Staff Member at Watson.
Research Overview
My research interests center around the development of cloud software, hypervisors, and operating system kernels.
My Ph.D. thesis research, advised by Hakim Weatherspoon at Cornell and Hani Jamjoom at IBM , focused on how to efficiently deploy large systems on clouds irrespective of whether they are public, private or a mixture of both. In particular, I investigated how to safely reduce under-utilization of resources through oversubscription with Overdriver, and addressed the inflexibility of today's cloud services with the Xen-Blanket.
Also at Cornell, I helped build the Nexus operating system from scratch and researched operating system mechanisms to support trustworthy computing; in particular, how to reduce the trusted computing base (TCB).
Publications
Shriram Rajagopalan, Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, and Andrew Warfield. Escape Capsule: Explicit State Is Robust and Scalable. In Proceedings of USENIX HotOS, Santa Ana Pueblo, NM, May 2013 (to appear).
Zuhair Khayyat, Karim Awara, Amani Alonazi, Hani Jamjoom, Dan Williams, and Panos Kalnis. Mizan: A System for Dynamic Load Balancing in Large-scale Graph Processing. In Proceedings of ACM EuroSys, Prague, Czech Republic, April 2013 (to appear).
Shriram Rajagopalan, Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, and Andrew Warfield. Split/Merge: System Support for Elastic Execution in Virtual Middleboxes. In Proceedings of USENIX NSDI, Lombard, IL, April 2013 (to appear).
Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, and Hakim Weatherspoon. Plug into the Supercloud. In IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Virtualization, March-April 2013 (vol. 17 no. 2).
Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, and Hakim Weatherspoon. The Xen-Blanket: Virtualize Once, Run Everywhere. In Proceedings of ACM EuroSys, Bern, Switzerland, April 2012.
Emin Gün Sirer, Willem de Bruijn, Patrick Reynolds, Alan Shieh, Kevin Walsh, Dan Williams, and Fred B. Schneider. Logical Attestation: An Authorization Architecture for Trustworthy Computing. In 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Cascais, Portugal, October 2011.
Dan Williams, Eslam Elnikety, Mohamed Eldehiry, Hani Jamjoom, Hai Huang, and Hakim Weatherspoon. Unshackle the Cloud! In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), Portland, OR, June 2011.
Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, Yew-Huey Liu, and Hakim Weatherspoon. Overdriver: Handling Memory Overload in an Oversubscribed Cloud. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), Newport Beach, CA, March 2011.
Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, Yew-Huey Liu, and Hakim Weatherspoon. Overdriver: Enabling High Data Center Utilization Through Aggressive Memory Oversubscription (invited talk). In INFORMS 2010 Cloud Computing Cluster, Austin, TX, November 2010.
Dan Williams, Patrick Reynolds, Kevin Walsh, Emin Gün Sirer, and Fred B. Schneider. Device Driver Safety Through a Reference Validation Mechanism . In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), San Diego, CA, December 2008.
Alan Shieh, Dan Williams, Kevin Walsh, Oliver Kennedy, Patrick Reynolds, Emin Gün Sirer, and Fred B. Schneider. Nexus: A New Operating System for Building Trustworthy Applications (poster). In Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Design and Implementation (NSDI), Cambridge, MA, April 2007.
Alan Shieh, Dan Williams, Emin Gün Sirer, and Fred B. Schneider. Nexus: A New Operating System For Trustworthy Computing (extended abstract) . In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Brighton, UK, October 2005.
Dan Williams and Emin Gün Sirer. Optimal Parameter Selection for Efficient Memory Integrity Verification Using Merkle Hash Trees. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA) - Trustworthy Network Computing Workshop, Cambridge, MA, August 2004.