I am on an internship at MSR Asia with the Systems group until the end of 2009.

Ivan Beschastnikh

University of Washington
Computer Science and Engineering
Paul G. Allen Center, Box 352350
185 Stevens Way, Seattle WA 98195

how to reach me
Public PGP, Fingerprint

PhD student working with Tom Anderson,
and Arvind Krishnamurthy.

Active Projects

  • Harmony - A Data and Routing Consistent DHT
  • A DHT (Distributed Hash Table) is distributed key-value storage system. Although DHTs have been thoroughly researched, they are in dire need of applications. One of the reasons for this is their typically abysmal performance, loose consistency and lack of availability guarantees. This project aims to design and implement a DHT that has strict data consistency guarantees. This project is an evolution of prior work by the systems community on improving performance of DHTs, and prior work by the theory of distributed systems community on the efficiency of distributed consistency algorithms such as Paxos and its variants.

  • Seattle - An Educational Cloud Computing Platform
  • Seattle is a platform for networking and distributed systems research. It's free, community-driven, and offers a large deployment of computers spread across the world. Seattle works by operating on resources donated by users and institutions. The global distribution of the Seattle network provides users the ability to use Seattle in application contexts that include cloud computing, peer-to-peer networking, ubiquitous/mobile computing, and distributed systems. It is currently being targeted toward educators teaching networking and distributed systems classes.

  • SatelliteLab - A Heterogeneous Network Testbed
  • This project is based at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and is part of my Summer 2007 internship work with Krishna P. Gummadi. The goal of SatelliteLab (SatLab) is to design and implement a system that improves the heterogeneity of existing internet testbeds (e.g. PlanetLab, RON) by including internet edge-nodes. Nodes located in edge-networks (e.g. residential networks) are typically unreliable, cover a wide range of software and hardware configurations, and have widely varying network connectivity characteristics. These dimensions of heterogeneity are especially important for accurately testing distributed system prototypes. Today such prototypes are developed in highly homogeneous testbed environments that hinder their readiness for realistic deployment. SatLab makes it easier to evaluate, debug, and explain the observed performance of distributed systems in the wild.

  • Social Practices in Wikipedia
  • I am also interested in analysis of social networks. This includes both quantitative analysis (e.g. member graph structures, activity patterns) as well as qualitative analysis (e.g. intensive study of activity samples, interviews). I am nourishing this interest by studying Wikipedia's policy mechanism and the interactions between wikipedia editors on discussion pages as they employ policies to arrive at consensus and make progress in their work. Our more recent work studies the span of valued work in Wikipedia by leveraging the Wikipedia Barnstars practice in which tokens of appreciation are exchanged between Wikipedia editors.

Past Projects

  • VFER
  • VFER is a congestion controlled transport protocol that enables client applications to define a 'functional' level of reliability with a callback reliability function. VFER has a delay-based congestion control scheme that attempts to achieve the theoretical optimum by monitoring delay variations and applying control theory to packet spacing. VFER is an experimental protocol that aims to be TCP-friendly and robust in heterogeneous network latency environments. At the moment, VFER has a C library implementation and a reliable file transfer scp-like test application. This project was initially brainstormed with Matei Ripeanu, before becoming a Google Summer of Code 2005 implementation project at Internet2 with Stanislav Shalunov as my mentor. It continued as an internship with the transport group at Internet2 and received three new students under the Google Summer of Code 2006 program, one of whom was mentored by me.

  • SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment)
  • Modeling and simulation using high-performance computing are playing an increasingly important role in decision making and prediction. For time-critical emergency decision support applications, such as influenza modeling and severe weather prediction, late results may be useless. A specialized infrastructure is needed to provide computational resources quickly. SPRUCE, is a system for supporting urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computing Grids. Currently deployed on the TeraGrid, SPRUCE provides users with ``right-of-way'' tokens that can be activated from a Web-based portal in the event of an urgent computing need. Tokens are transferrable and can be restricted to specific resource sets and priority levels. Once a session is activated, job submissions may request elevated priority. Based on local policy, computing resources can respond, for example, by preempting active jobs or raising the job's priority in the queue.

  • ZeptoOS
  • A Linux distribution effort for petascale cluster Operating Systems centered at Argonne National Labs. Currently deployed on the Compute and IO nodes of Argonne's BG\L machine, it is a massive undertaking that resulted in a GPLed codebase and promises to become a mainstream distribution for future IBM's BlueGene family clusters. My involvement with this project has been work done during the summer 2005 internship at ANL on ZOID, the ZeptoOS IO Daemon. The ZOID codebase I developed emulates the IO\Compute node syscall redirection on x86 clusters.

  • Wireless Sensor Networks at ANL
  • This effort started with a couple of classes at UChicago, and escalated into a ANL building 221 sensor-net over my summer 2005 internship at ANL. The network is two stargates with hallway mounted MicaZ motes, all running the fantastic TinyOS.

Publications

Promoting Quality in Wikipedia through Enculturation
Ivan Beschastnikh David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry, Travis Kriplean, Alan Borning.
Appeared at the Approaching 'Amateur' Workshop at GROUP 2009.
System Design for Social Translucence in Socially Mediating Technologies
David W. McDonald, Ivan Beschastnikh Travis Kriplean, Alan Borning, Mark Zachry.
Appeared at the Socially Mediating Technologies Workshop at CHI 2009.
Designing Mediating Spaces Between Citizens and Government
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh Alan Borning, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry.
Appeared at the Socially Mediating Technologies Workshop at CHI 2009.
Seattle: The Internet as an Educational Testbed
Justin Cappos, Ivan Beschastnikh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson.
In Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2009.
Articulations of WikiWork: Uncovering Valued Work in Wikipedia through Barnstars
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald.
In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2008.
Best Paper Honorable Mention
SatelliteLab: Adding Heterogeneity to Planetary-Scale Testbeds
Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Ivan Beschastnikh, Krishna P. Gummadi, Stefan Saroiu.
In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, SIGCOMM 2008.
Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens
Ivan Beschastnikh, Travis Kriplean, David W. McDonald.
In Proceedings of the 2008 AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2008.
Awarded Best Paper
Community, Consensus, Coercion, Control: CS*W or How Policy Mediates Mass Participation
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald, Scott Golder.
In Proceedings of the ACM 2007 International Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP 2007.
Building an Infrastructure for Urgent Computing
Pete Beckman, Ivan Beschastnikh, Suman Nadella, Nick Trebon.
Chapter in 'High Performance Computing and Grids in Action' by IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2007
SPRUCE: A System for Supporting Urgent High-Performance Computing
Pete Beckman, Suman Nadella, Nick Trebon, Ivan Beschastnikh
In Proceedings of IFIP WoCo9 Conference, 2006.
The Earth Vision Time Machine: A Design for the Collaborative Sharing of Wireless Sensor Data
Pete Beckman, Ivan Beschastnikh, Cameron Cooper, Isaac Wasileski
In 5th Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments, WACE 2005

Presentations

SatelliteLab: Adding Heterogeneity to Planetary-Scale Testbeds
Andreas Haeberlen, Marcel Dischinger, Ivan Beschastnikh, Krishna Gummadi
Poster at SOSP 2007, Stevenson, WA, USA, October 2007
VFER: High-performance Transport in User Space
Stanislav Shalunov, Ivan Beschastnikh
SuperComputing 2006 Bandwidth Challenge Finalist, November 2006.
SPRUCE: Special Priority and Urgent Computing Environment
Ivan Beschastnikh
Grand Prize winning student research competition poster at TeraGrid 2006.
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