I am a third year Ph.D. student in Computer Science working with the Systems and Networking Group at UC San Diego advised by Professor Amin Vahdat. I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Caltech in 2009. My research interests include distributed systems and data center networks.

Current Work

I am currently developing Themis, the successor to TritonSort. Themis is a framework for building efficient and balanced distributed applications. We have a MapReduce implementation built on top of Themis, which we are actively working to improve in terms of balance, speed, and robustness.

Past Work

I developed the world's fastest sorting system, TritonSort. TritonSort achieves record speeds by focusing on per-disk and per-node efficiency. TritonSort's goal is to sort data at the speed of the disks by keeping all disks constantly reading or writing data in large contiguous chunks. TritonSort set world records in the 2010 and 2011 Sortbenchmark.org competitions. We hold a total of seven world records: 2010 Indy GraySort, 2010 Indy MinuteSort, 2011 Daytona GraySort, 2011 Indy GraySort, 2011 Indy MinuteSort, 2011 Daytona 100TB JouleSort, 2011 Indy 100TB JouleSort. Five of these are current world records.

TritonSort was able compete in the Daytona category after we implemented MapReduce on top of its core components. Future work consists of verifying efficiency and balance in general MapReduce applications.

I held a Software Engineering Intern position at Google during the summer of 2011 working in the MapReduce group with my mentor Marian Dvorsky.

I held a Software Engineering Intern position at Google during the summer of 2010 working in the search infrastructure group with my mentor Alexander Yip.

During summer of 2009, I investigated balanced systems within the MapReduce framework of Hadoop. Goals consisted of analyzing cluster resources during a MapReduce job, identifying bottlenecks, and classifying various types of jobs according to these bottlenecks with the hope of being able to utilize cluster resources more efficiently.

TritonSort: A Balanced Large-Scale Sorting System, Alexander Rasmussen, George Porter, Michael Conley, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Alexander Pucher, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the 8th ACM/USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Boston, MA, March 2011.

SortBenchmark 2011: TritonSort competed again in the Sort Benchmark competition in April 2011. This year we set 5 records (all wins, no ties): Indy 100TB GraySort, Daytona 100TB GraySort, Indy 60 second MinuteSort, Indy 100TB Joulesort, Daytona 100TB Joulesort. We built a general purpose MapReduce implementation with an initial sampling phase that enabled us to take the Daytona (general purpose) records. The SortBenchmark rules were updated this year to include a 100TB JouleSort category, which measures records/joule as the performance metric. As it turns out, focusing on cluster balance and resource utilzation appears to be a viable means for power efficient computing. TritonSort's JouleSort performance is less than an order of magnitude off of the most efficient system in any of the other JouleSort categories. Keep in mind that energy efficiency was not a primary goal of the TritonSort project. You can read our submission document here.

SortBenchmark 2010: TritonSort, the world's fastest cluster based disk-to-disk sorting system, which we submitted to the Sort Benchmark competition in May 2010. TritonSort placed first in the Indy MinuteSort 60 second category and tied for first in the Indy GraySort 100TB category. TritonSort focuses on per-node efficiency and aims to achieve sorting throughput as close as possible to the sequential speed of the disks. See the SortBenchmark submission document here.

In addition to developing computer systems, I enjoy driving cars. In December of 2009, I picked up a 2001 Chevrolet Corvette, and it's been a dream. Every morning I look forward to getting in my car and driving to work. At some point I am going to go to Racelegal and get myself timed. Racelegal is a group of street racing enthusiasts who do monthly sanctioned races in the parking lot of Qualcomm Stadium here in sunny San Diego. If you're in town and interested in cars I would highly recommend checking it out.