Research of Nalini Venkatasubramanian (NV)
Research Group
- Distributed Systems Middleware Group (see here for recent projects)
- Research Areas and Interests
o Composable Middleware for Open Distributed Systems
o Resource Management in Open Distributed Systems
o Quality of Service Specification and Enforcement
o Digital Dance and Choreography
Prof. Venkatasubramanian's research focuses on enabling effective management and utilization of resources in the evolving global information infrastructure.
o Global information systems consist of asynchronous, autonomous components that are open and distributed. For instance, multimedia (MM) applications may be reliable, available, responsive, and secure or not.
o Furthermore, wide-area service providers require cost-effective use of resources. Varying requirements posed by applications, customers, and service providers make the task of resource management in the evolving global information infrastructure complicated and challenging - one with significant commercial impact as well.
o NV's research addresses issues in the development of a flexible, component-based middleware infrastructure for the global infrastructure with services that provide reliability, availability, security and QoS.
§ Using Actors, a model of concurrent active objects, NV develops meta-architectures that allow for placement, scheduling, synchronization and management of components.
§ NV's research also involves the development of theoretical foundations and techniques for reasoning about interactions and ways of ensuring the safe composition of services while maintaining quality.
o Her current work includes techniques for the safe integration of mechanisms for load balancing, fault tolerance and end-to-end QoS management.
o NV has worked on policies for cost-effective load management in distributed multimedia servers.
o NV has also worked on economic models used to charge for QoS in a distributed multimedia environment and would like to pursue this as well.
o Network-centric computing and mobile environments are two interesting applications that NV intends to explore.
o NV is also interested in applications of distributed computing and multimedia systems to art and the system level issues that arise from requirements in this domain.
PhD Dissertation
"An Adaptive Resource Management Architecture for Global Distributed Computing" , Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Summary of Dissertation Research
Advances in networking, communication, storage, computing, and multimedia technologies coupled with many emerging application areas is fueling the merger of computing and communication systems. This will result in a global information infrastructure of the size and magnitude erstwhile unimaginable. Such an infrastructure will have numerous services and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A key issue in developing a global information infrastructure is that of effective management and utilization of resources. Increasingly, applications require delivery of multifaceted digital information services with stringent requirements on the delivery of information. For instance, multimedia applications have QoS (Quality of Service) parameters that define the extent to which performance specifications such as responsiveness, reliability, availability, security and cost-effectiveness may be violated. Varying requirements posed by applications, customers, and service providers makes the task of resource management in the evolving global information infrastructure a challenging research problem - one with significant commercial impact as well.
In this thesis, we present a new paradigm for developing safe, customizable middleware for the global information infrastructure. The composition of multiple resource management services is necessary to guarantee safe, cost-effective QoS in such an infrastructure, which by its very nature is open and distributed. We specify core resource management services -- remote creation, distributed snapshot and directory services that can be used as a basis for more complex activities. The thesis develops mathematical frameworks and formal mechanisms for reasoning about the interaction and composition of resource management activities in open distributed systems, their dynamic installation and modification. In particular, we develop a two-level meta-architectural model of distributed computation based on Actors. This enables us to consider separately issues such as: functional behavior of an application; and resource management issues such as storage management, load balancing, QoS specification and enforcement. The utility of this approach is illustrated by developing QoS based resource management techniques for distributed multimedia systems and reasoning about them.
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