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



jude

About Me

I'm a second-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.

I study with Dr. Larry Peterson.  Right now, I'm developing a read-write distributed filesystem called Syndicate that uses a CDN to drive data delivery to a scalable number of remote readers. In doing so, Syndicate decouples file persistence from read performance, which lets users keep their file data on any media they want without hindering aggregate remote reader performance. Syndicate is CDN-agnostic and makes as few assumptions about its CDN's behavior as possible, but still gives users close-to-open file consistency in the face of multiple writers.

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


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.