Princeton S* Network Systems

So after a few months of (occasional) posts, we finally decided to give the blog a name.

Dirty Slate Design reflects a design philosophy for systems and networking research, where deployability is a central goal.  While it’s often tempting to try to solve problems by wiping the slate clean and starting afresh, expecting a complete redesign and redeployment of systems as important, complex, and far-flung as the Web or the Internet is rather optimistic at best.

So, rather than implying something that is just “quick and dirty,” this philosophy tries to push new functionality or designs in a way that can be … Continue Reading

In the previous post, I discussed how CoralCDN implemented bandwidth restrictions that were fair-shared between “customer” domains. There was another major twist to this problem, however, that I didn’t talk about: the challenge of performing such a technique on a virtualized and shared platform such as PlanetLab.  While my discussion is certainly PlanetLab-centric, its questions are also applicable to other P2P deployments where users run peers within resource containers, or to commercial hosting environments using billing models such as 95th percentile usage.

Interacting with hosting platforms

CoralCDN’s self-regulation works well in trusted environments, and this approach is used similarly in other peer-to-peer … Continue Reading

For commercial CDNs and other computing services, the typical answer to resource limits is simply to acquire more capacity.  As CoralCDN’s deployment on PlanetLab does not have that luxury, we instead apply admission control to manage its bandwidth resources.  This post describes some of these mechanisms, while we’ll take a step back in the next post to describe some of the challenges in doing resource accounting and management on a virtualized and shared platform such as PlanetLab.

Following the Asian tsunami of December … Continue Reading