HP LABS
Location: HP Labs, Silicon Valley
Position Type: Summer internship
Mentor: Dr. Wojciech Golab (wojciech.golab@hp.com),
http://www.hpl.hp.com/people/wojciech_golab/
PROJECT OUTLINE
In recent years, Web-scale workloads have outgrown conventional relational databases and clustered file systems. As a result, many novel storage and query processing systems have blossomed (e.g., "NoSQL" and "NewSQL" systems, key-value stores, document stores, and more). Such offerings provide a wide variety of features differing along several major axes-consistency, availability, latency, partition-tolerance, durability, and support for transactions. In terms of consistency, systems have long been compared against the gold standard of serializability, but they increasingly provide much weaker properties such as eventual consistency. The motivation for sacrificing consistency is two-fold: First, it yields a reduction in latency by allowing requests to complete with fewer network delays. Secondly, as stated by Brewer's CAP principle, a highly available partition-tolerant system cannot be strongly consistent. That said, such systems often provide much stronger consistency under ordinary (partition-free) operating conditions. In this project, we aim to evaluate the consistency properties of cloud storage systems and correlate consistency measurements with internal design details of such systems. The intern will gain hands-on experience with modern open source cloud software (e.g., Cassandra), and will help develop state-of-the art algorithmic techniques for quantifying and visualizing consistency. Depending on the student, we expect to produce theoretical/analytical results suitable for submission to PODC or DISC, or empirical results suitable for submission to NSDI, FAST, or OSDI.
POINTERS
PODC 2011 paper: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2011/HPL-2011-6.pdf
HotDep 2010 paper: http://www.usenix.org/event/hotdep10/tech/full_papers/Anderson.pdf
REQUIREMENTS
Current registration in a PhD program in a relevant field (computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, statistics, etc.).
HOW TO APPLY
Contact Dr. Wojciech Golab (wojciech.golab@hp.com) with your resume.