Kevin Webb

About Me

I'm a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science working in the Systems and Networking Group at the University of California, San Diego. My advisors are Alex Snoeren and Ken Yocum. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2007.

My resume contains additional information about me.

Research

My general research interests are in distributed systems, cloud computing, networks, and parallel computation.

Current Projects

Distributed Rate Limiting (DRL)

Provisioning and accounting for resource usage in cloud computing environments is a challenging technical problem. Distributed Rate Limiting provides a cost control mechanism whereby multiple traffic limiters work together to enforce a global rate limit across multiple sites. My recent work has been in building a fully-functional implementation of DRL for use in the PlanetLab research testbed. Several production Planetlab nodes are currently using DRL to enforce their site-wide rate limits. I recently gave a talk about this work at a CNS research review.

BIPS

I've recently starting working on a project called BIPS, whose goal is to build support for incremental data processing into large-scale distributed processing systems like MapReduce. I'm currently looking at better ways of scheduling tasks on the available hardware resources. I'll have more information in the future...

Past Projects

Mace Model Checker

Mace is a language that simplifies the development of distributed systems by allowing developers to specify their system as a event-driven state machine. One of the compelling tools in the Mace package is the model checker, which is capable of detecting safety and liveness violations in the logic of Mace programs. I recently extended the Mace model checker to run in parallel on large clusters and supercomputers.

Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN)

As an undergrad, I worked with Ellen Zegura on her Disruption Tolerant Networking project. The goal of DTN is to provide reliable network connectivity in the absence of typical communication infrastructure. I was responsible for building a cross-platform DTN implementation for use on PDAs, phones, and other hand-held equipment.

Publications

None, yet. I recently submitted a paper about distributing the Mace model checker to Usenix '09, and we're working on a TOCS paper for DRL.

Hobbies

My hobbies include cactus gardening and woodworking.

Contact

Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0404
La Jolla, Ca 92093-0404

Office: 3146 CSE

E-mail: