Vivek S. Pai
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Technology Transfer

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

SSDAlloc - allowing applications to use solid-state memory as transparent extensions system DRAM, simply by changing memory allocation calls. Commercially licensed by Fusion-IO, and still available for licensing.
Outcome: commercial success & university licensing success

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, and subsequently by Akamai. Now deployed at a number of telcos and cable systems around the world.
Outcome: commercial success for us and others

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.
Outcome: shaped virtually every new Web server design

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.
Outcome: commercial success for us and others

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.
Outcome: integrated into CoBlitz

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.
Outcome: commercial success, widely used

SpecWeb/sendfile Improvements - a series of operating systems improvements that reduced latency and increased performance on Web workloads. Now incorporated in the FreeBSD operating system, which runs on dozens of machines around the world.
Outcome: contribution to open source community

CoDeeN Distributed Web proxy - running on PlanetLab, with 70K+ daily users and tens of millions of requests handled per day. A rich source of Web traffic data that has been used by a half-dozen or so researchers.
Outcome: a source of real data for the research community


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