Anirudh Badam

About Me

I am currently a final year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University working with Vivek Pai. I previously obtained a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras in 2006. I will be graduating this year and I am actively looking for jobs.

Application Material

Cover Letter: [PDF]
Curriculum Vitae: [PDF]
Research Statement: [PDF]
Teaching Statement: [PDF]
Single File: [PDF]

Research

I am interested broadly in the areas of Distributed Systems, Computer Networks and Operating Systems.

At Princeton, I work with Vivek Pai. We are working towards bridging the gap between the memory and the storage layer of today's systems. The ever increasing amount of data and the need to access more of it quickly has magnified the gap between the main memory and the traditional secondary storage devices. The limited memory capacity of servers coupled with the limits of RAM density imposes a large premium on obtaining high in-memory hit-rates that are vital for today's servers. Our techniques not only explore new approaches to increase indexing efficiency of secondary storage but also explore new and effective ways to incorporate non-volatile memories like Flash and PCM into virtual memory hierarchy of an operating system. Both the techniques help greatly improve the effective memory capacity of servers in a cost efficient manner.

I was an intern at FusionIO from Feb-Aug 2011. Over there, I was working on revamping the swap sub-system of operating systems to be more friendly with new non-volatile memory technologies.

During summer 09, I was at Intel Labs Pittsburgh for a summer internship. I was working with Michael Kaminsky, Dina Papagiannaki, Dave Andersen and Shrini Seshan on the Neighborhood Aware Networks project.

During summer 08, I was at HP Labs, Princeton, for a summer internship. I was working with Jack Brassil towards developing a transport protocol in the presence of a mechanism to guarantee explicit band width to a link between 2 hosts. Anangran is a company which manufactures routers which provide such bandwidth guarantees for end-to-end links involving these routers.

Previously, I worked with Prof. C. Siva Ram Murthy at HPCN Lab for my undergraduate thesis work (fall 05, spring 06). The work was about developing new protocols for video multicast in ad hoc wireless networks.

Before that, I interned at IBM during the summer after the 3rd year at IIT Madras (summer 05). There I worked on developing a middleware for applications that can utilize parallel processing. I was working with Jagir Hussan, who is now at University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Projects

SSDAlloc - SSDAlloc is an easy to use hybrid SSD/RAM slab based memory allocation tool. It helps programmers build high-performance SSD applications (comparable to that of application rewrite) while requiring very few modifications to application code. It exposes a slab based memory allocation interface to the programmer and manages the data flow in and out of an SSD in a transparent manner using a backend runtime system. It also stores frequently used application data in a compact manner in RAM. The only modifications needed for a new application involve migrating to this slab allocator from traditional malloc/calloc memory allocation tools. SSDAlloc is currently under an exclusive license agreement (including IP) with Fusion-io.

Neighborhood-Aware Networks - Home 802.11 networks have a significantly higher bandwidth compared to broadband connections. This bandwidth can be exploited to provide alternative, high-speed connectivity between homes in a neighborhood. In this project, we explore how such existing (and growing) wireless connectivity between homes can be used to provide "neighborhood-aware" application-level protocols and services. As part of the wider neighborhood-aware networks project, we have created a "neighborhood-aware" wireless transport protocol that boosts the bandwidth of the lossy but potentially high bandwidth neighborhood wireless links by exploiting the reliabile, but expensive broadband links between homes. Such a transport protocol can be used for implementing a high speed mesh-type neighborhood-wide cache to share popular multimedia content, thereby reducing the pressure on the broadband links.

HashCache - An efficient indexing mechanism for building many types of caches including web proxy caches, WAN accelerators/network packet caches and caches for inline data deduplicators. HashCache uses extremely low amount of memory per index entry and can index upto 20 times more data for the same amount of DRAM when compared to previous techniques. In the past, we used a HashCache based web proxy cache and WAN accelerator using inexpensive hardware to provide a high-bandwidth Internet experience over low-bandwidth and high-latency satellite links in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda. Each year, MIT's Technology Review publishes a list of 10 emerging technologies. They had included HashCache in the list of the 10 emerging technologies of 2009. HashCache is currently under an exclusive license agreement (including IP) with Verivue. It *could* go Sleepycat later this year (2011).

Publications

Conferences and Journals

'The Hare and the Tortoise: Tackling Wireless Losses by Exploiting Wired Reliability'
Anirudh Badam, Dongsu Han, Dave Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Dina Papagiannaki, Srinivasan Seshan
In Proc. 12th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc '11). [Paper] [Slides]

'SSDAlloc: Hybrid SSD/RAM Memory Management Made Easy'
Anirudh Badam, Vivek S. Pai
In Proc. 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '11). [Paper] [Slides]

'First-Class Access For Developing-World Environments'
Vivek S. Pai, Anirudh Badam, Sunghwan Ihm, KyoungSoo Park
In Proc. 5th International Conference on Future Internet Technologies (CFI 2010).

'K-Tree: A Multiple Tree Video Multicast Protocol for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks' (extended version of the HiPC '06 publication)
Tamma Bheemarjuna Reddy, Anirudh Badam, C. Siva Ram Murthy, Ramesh R. Rao
In Computer Networks 54(11): 1864-1884 (2010).

'HashCache: Cache Storage for the Next Billion'
Anirudh Badam, KyoungSoo Park, Vivek S. Pai, Larry L. Peterson
In Proc. 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '09). [Paper] [Slides]

'K-Tree: A Multiple Tree Video Multicast Protocol for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks'
Anirudh Badam, Tamma Bheemarjuna Reddy, C. Siva Ram Murthy
In Proc. 13th IEEE International Conference On High Performance Computing (HiPC '06).

Workshops

'Enabling Application Directed Storage Devices'
Anirudh Badam, David W. Nellans
To appear in the 3rd Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (UCSD NVMW '12).

'NAND-Flash: Fast Disks or Slow Memory?'
Kshitij Sudan, Anirudh Badam, David W. Nellans
To appear in the 3rd Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (UCSD NVMW '12).

'SSDAlloc: Hybrid SSD/RAM Allocation Made Easy'
Anirudh Badam, Vivek S. Pai
Appeared in the IBM T.J. Watson Nonvolatile Memory Student Workshop 2010.
Also appeared in the 2nd Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (UCSD NVMW '11).

'First-Class Access For Developing-World Environments'
Vivek S. Pai, Anirudh Badam, Sunghwan Ihm, KyoungSoo Park
Position Paper at CCC Workshop on Computer Science and Global Development (2009). [Paper]

'Beating Netbooks Into Servers: Making Some Computers More Equal Than Others'
Anirudh Badam, Vivek S. Pai
In Proc. 3rd ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR '09). [Paper] [Slides]