Vivek Pai Associate Professor

35 Olden Street Princeton, NJ 08540 off: 609-258-2086 fax: 609-258-1771 vivek@cs.princeton.edu

Quick
Links

Graduate School Applications | Research | Publications | Students | Teaching | Brief Bio | Tech Transfer

Research
Areas

Network Server Design & Performance
Operating Systems
Networking
High-Performance Applications

Content Distribution Networks
Robustness, performance under load
Security, fault tolerance
The CoDeeN Content Distribution Network
CoDNS - a reliable name lookup service
CoBlitz and CoDeploy - scalable large file transfer and update
CoMon and CoTop - monitoring tools

Publications

My complete list of publications, some of which are also included in the publications section of Princeton's Network Systems Group pages.

Students

My current PhD-track students:
Anirudh Badam
Wonho Kim

My former students:
Sunghwan Ihm, PhD, now at Google
Michael Golightly
Lindsey Poole, now at Amazon
KyoungSoo Park, PhD, now at KAIST
Limin Wang, PhD (shared with Larry Peterson), now at AT&T
Yaoping Ruan, PhD, now at IBM TJ Watson

Other students I've worked with:
Ming Zhang, PhD (advised by Randy Wang), now at Microsoft Research

Teaching

Fall 2011 - IW Co-Coordinator      and co-teaching Operating Systems	Spring 2012 - COS 217 Introduction to Programming Systems
Fall 2010 - Preceptor for COS 217 Introduction to Programming Systems	Spring 2010 - On leave Sold CoBlitz startup, worked for acquirer
Fall 2009 - IW Coordinator IW & Thesis coordination	Spring 2010 - COS 217 & IW Coordinator Introduction to Programming Systems
Fall 2008 - COS 217 Introduction to Programming Systems	Spring 2009 - COS 598C Systems Support for Developing Regions
Fall 2007 - CoBlitz Sabbatical	Spring 2008 - CoBlitz Sabbatical
Fall 2006 - Multiple COS 126 Preceptor - General Computer Science     COS 561 Co-Teacher - Advanced Computer Networks     COS 397/497/JIW/SRT - Independent Work	Spring 2007 COS 397/497/JIW/SRT - Independent Work
Fall 2005 - COS 518 Advanced Operating Systems	Spring 2006 - COS 217 Introduction to Programming Systems
Fall 2004 - COS 518 Advanced Operating Systems	Spring 2005 junior leave
Fall 2003 - COS 518 Advanced Operating Systems	Spring 2004 - COS 461 Computer Networks
Fall 2002 - COS 318 Operating Systems	Spring 2003 - COS 461 Computer Networks
Fall 2001 - COS 318 Operating Systems	Spring 2002 - COS 598B Scale & Performance in Network Servers
Fall 2000 - COS 318 Operating Systems	Spring 2001 On leave at iMimic Networking
	Spring 2000 - COS 598F Scale & Performance in Network Servers

Grad
Apps

Please read this page before asking me questions about applying to graduate school. It contains answers to some of the questions I receive most often, and it saves everyone involved much time and effort. Following the directions shows that you value my time just as I would hope that you would like others to value yours.

Brief
Bio

Vivek Pai has worked in numerous areas of server design and performance, from the depths of optimizing TCP checksum performance and eliminating buffer copying, all the way up to designing scalable content delivery infrastructures. In the middle, he has worked on improving OS performance for server applications, designing software architectures for high-performance servers, and developing intelligent server clustering algorithms. He co-founded iMimic Networking, where he helped architect and develop the fastest Web proxy server in the world. iMimic was acquired by Ironport Systems, which was subsequently acquired by Cisco. He also co-founded CoBlitz LLC, doing the same for content delivery networks, which was later acquired by Verivue.

Tech
Transfer

Several of our research projects have made it out of the lab in one form or another.

Name	Description	Commercial Success	Participation
Locality-Aware Request Distribution	this approach makes it relatively simple for a load balancer to optimize the performance of a set of servers. It was first picked up in the Zeus Load Balancer, which is now owned by Riverbed. It also made it into a number of other load balancers, including the Linux Virtual Server, which is a standard part of most Linux server distributions.	Yes	No
Flash Web Server	this server pioneered a new software architecture for Web servers that split memory-based processing from disk processing. Virtually every high-performance Web/proxy server since that time has adopted some variant of this architecture.	Not Directly
iMimic Networking	our startup to apply the Flash Web Server concepts to high-performance Web proxies. We had about a dozen OEMs and set virtually every record for Web proxy servers. Acquired by Ironport Systems, later acquired by Cisco.	Yes	Yes
SpecWeb/sendfile Improvements	a series of operating systems improvements that reduced latency and increased performance handling high-performance Web workloads. Now incorporated in the FreeBSD operating system, which runs on dozens of machines around the world.	Unlikely?
CoDeeN	Distributed Web proxy running on PlanetLab, with 70K+ daily users and millions of requests handled per day. A rich source of Web traffic data that has been used by a half-dozen or so researchers.	No
CoBlitz	provides scalable large-file transfer from PlanetLab machines to the general public, with self-organizing and self-healing behavior. Spun out as CoBlitz LLC, then acquired by Verivue. Now deployed at a number of telcos and cable systems around the world.	Yes	Yes
CoMon	large-scale monitoring of the PlanetLab platform, including traffic monitoring and visualization for the CoBlitz system. Sold along with the CoBlitz system, and capable of producing pretty pictures.	N/A