Mahesh Balakrishnan

Contact information:

Mahesh Balakrishnan
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-7501
607-255-0226
607-255-4428 (FAX)
email: mahesh at beep cs dot beep cornell dot beep beep edu (remove the beeps)

***I have graduated and am now at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. This page is no longer updated --- My new webpage is here.


I am a 5th year PhD Candidate in the CS department at Cornell University. My advisor is Ken Birman. My research interests include networked and distributed systems of any flavor - my work to date has centered on protocols and mechanisms for high-performance systems running within and across datacenters.

Specifically, I am working towards the vision of the real-time datacenter --- one that reacts to events and failures within seconds. My thesis is the first step towards this goal: network primitives that recover from packet loss in milliseconds. Here's a video of a job talk I gave at MSR Redmond that summarizes my thesis research.

I spent the summer of 2006 at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, where I worked with `Rama' Ramasubramanian and Dahlia Malkhi on Internet Latency Prediction.

Current and past collaborators at Cornell include Danny Dolev, Tudor Marian, Lakshmi Ganesh, Amar Phanishayee, Stefan Pleisch, Robbert van Renesse, Einar Vollset and Hakim Weatherspoon.

Before joining the PhD program at Cornell, I got a BS from Georgia Tech. Here is my (slightly out-of-date) CV and a research statement I wrote in Spring 08.

Publications

• On the Treeness of Internet Latency and Bandwidth
  Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Dahlia Malkhi, Fabian Kuhn, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Archit Gupta, Aditya Akella.
  To appear in SIGMETRICS / Performance 2009: Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, Seattle, WA, June 2009.
  


• Smoke and Mirrors: Shadowing Files at Remote Locations without Performance Loss
  Hakim Weatherspoon, Lakshmi Ganesh, Tudor Marian, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman.
  To appear in FAST 2009: 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, San Francisco, CA, February 2009.
  


• Reliable Communication for Datacenters
  Mahesh Balakrishnan.
  PhD Thesis at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, January 2009.
  thesis


• Dr. Multicast: Rx for Datacenter Communication Scalability
  Ymir Vigfusson, Hussam Abu-Libdeh, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman, Yoav Tock.
  In HotNets VII: Seventh ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, Calgary, Canada, October 2008.
  paper


• Tempest: Soft State Replication in the Service Tier
  Tudor Marian, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse.
  In DSN 2008: 38th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DCCS track), Anchorage, AK, June 2008.
  paper


• Maelstrom: Transparent Error Correction for Lambda Networks
  Mahesh Balakrishnan, Tudor Marian, Ken Birman, Hakim Weatherspoon, Einar Vollset.
  In NSDI 2008: Fifth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, San Francisco, CA, April 2008.
  paper talk


• Reconstructing Approximate Tree Metrics
  Ittai Abraham, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Fabian Kuhn, Dahlia Malkhi, Kunal Talwar, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian.
  In PODC 2007: 26th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Portland, OR, August 2007.
  paper


• Optimizing Power Consumption in Large Scale Storage Systems
  Lakshmi Ganesh, Hakim Weatherspoon, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman.
  In HotOS XI: 11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, San Diego, CA, May 2007.
  paper


• Ricochet: Lateral Error Correction for Time-Critical Multicast
  Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman, Amar Phanishayee, Stefan Pleisch.
  In NSDI 2007: Fourth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Cambridge, MA, April 2007.
  paper BiBTeX talk


• Scalable Multicast Platforms for a New Generation of Robust Distributed Applications
  Ken Birman, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Danny Dolev, Tudor Marian, Krzysztof Ostrowski, Amar Phanishayee.
  In COMSWARE 2007: 2nd IEEE/Create-Net/ICST International Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware, Bangalore, India, January 2007.
  


• PLATO: Predictive Latency-Aware Total Ordering
  Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman and Amar Phanishayee.
  In SRDS 2006: 25th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, Leeds, UK, October 2006.
  paper BiBTeX talk


• Reliable Multicast for Time-Critical Systems
  Mahesh Balakrishnan and Ken Birman.
  In WASR 2006: 1st IEEE Workshop on Applied Software Reliability, Philadelphia, PA, June 2006.
  paper BiBTeX talk


• Mistral: Efficient Flooding in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
  Stefan Pleisch, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman and Robbert van Renesse.
  In MobiHoc 2006: 7th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, Florence, Italy, May 2006.
  paper BiBTeX


• Slingshot: Time-Critical Multicast for Clustered Applications
  Mahesh Balakrishnan, Stefan Pleisch and Ken Birman.
  In NCA 2005: 5th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, Boston, MA, July 2005.
  paper BiBTeX talk


 

Misc Presentations

• [ppt] Systems Lunch, Fall 2007 :: Sinfonia: A New Paradigm for Building Scalable Distributed Systems, SOSP 2007.
• [ppt] Systems Lunch, Fall 2005 :: Vigilante: End-to-end Containment of Internet Worms, SOSP 2005. (paper)
• [ppt] Systems Lunch, Spring 2005 :: An Algebraic Approach to Practical and Scalable Overlay Network Monitoring, SIGCOMM 2004. (paper)
• [ppt] CS614, Spring 2004 :: Large Scale Sharing: GFS and Past. (gfs, SOSP 2003) (past, SOSP 2001)

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