Jude Nelson

Jude Nelson

Graduate Student
Department of Computer Science
Advisor: Dr. Larry Peterson

Snail Mail:
35 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08540-5233

Office: CS 316
Email: jcnelson@cs.princeton.edu
My CV

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About Me

I'm a third-year graduate student at Princeton University.  My research interests include wide-area distributed computing systems, such as content distribution networks, distributed storage systems, wide-area network services, and cloud computing platforms.  I'm originally from Oro Valley, Arizona.

Syndicate

Right now, I'm developing a wide-area service called Syndicate that lets you combine disparate cloud storage services, CDNs, and caching proxies into a cohesive storage medium best suited for read-mostly workloads. Even in the presence of multiple writers and weakly-consistent network caches, Syndicate provides well-defined filesystem-like consistency semantics, whereby create and delete operations are sequentially consistent, but readers and writers may set per-file freshness time-outs, choosing the sweet spot between strong consistency and high availability. All the while, it provides the read and write bandwidth of network-local storage by leveraging underlying network caches for reads, and asynchronously propagating data on writes.

WISH

I'm also working on a project called WISH, the Wide-area Interactive SHell. It extends familiar UNIX shell scripting semantics to manage wide-area networks by augmenting an existing shell (like GNU bash) with an environment and command set to write and run parallel and distributed jobs. It provides commands for spawning, synchronizing, signalling, and joining with any process on any host in the network, as well as redirecting any process's input, output, and error to local files. It provides an environment for processes to get, set, and atomically test-and-set globally-visible shell variables, query the health of remote hosts, and expose local files for remote processes to read. All WISH-spawned processes print their output and error to the user's TTY and/or local files as if they were running asynchronously on localhost.

Classes Taken

  • Spring 2012
    • COS424 Interacting with Data
  • Fall 2011
    • COS518 Advanced Computing Systems
  • Spring 2011
    • COS423 Theory of Algorithms
  • Fall 2010
    • COS561 Advanced Computer Networks
    • COS402 Artificial Intelligence
    • COS441 Programming Languages
    • COS597B Advanced Topics in Datacenters

Classes TA'ed


Undergrad Experiences

I received my BS in computer science from the University of Arizona in May 2010, with a minor in Mathematics.  I attended the University of Arizona on a President's Award for Excellence scholarship, awarded in 2006.  I graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors.

My senior thesis was An Improved Multiprotocol Application Data Transfer Service.  I implemented an intelligent file transfer daemon (IFTD) and a protocol framework which allows it to use multiple unmodified file transfer protocol implementations to concurrently fetch pieces of files from one or more remote hosts. It measures and records pre-defined features (such as latency and bandwidth) of each protocol's performance, as well as file attributes (such as size, MIME type, etc.) of the data being transferred, to rank protocol utility for future file transfers with simple machine learning.  IFTD currently serves as the file transport framework for Raven, a provisioning service currently deployed on PlanetLab. My undergraduate thesis advisor was Dr. John H. Hartman.