Colloquium Details
Seattle: A Peer-to-Peer Platform for Safe Code Execution
Speaker: Justin Cappos, NYU Poly
Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302
Date: September 30, 2011, 11:30 a.m.
Host: Mehryar Mohri
Synopsis:
Two of the most significant computing trends of the past five years are peer-to-peer computing and cloud computing. Peer-to-peer systems are powerful in part because they harness under-utilized resources available on end user machines. However, peer-to-peer systems suffer from heterogeneity and a high rate of churn. In contrast, cloud computing allows computation to scale to meet demand via homogeneous virtual environments. However, these resources are often located far from users, are costly, and are restricted by the cloud provider's policies.
The vision of the Seattle project is to provide an infrastructure that gives the best of both worlds. We want to make it practical for arbitrary Internet users to securely participate in a peer-to-peer cloud environment. Seattle has been deployed for three years across about four thousand machines and has wide spread practical use as a testbed for researchers and educators. The Seattle testbed has been used by two dozen classes and is currently has over one thousand registered researchers.
The first part of this talk will give an overview and demo of the Seattle testbed. The second part of the talk will discuss some of the research challenges faced when building Seattle. This includes novel techniques for ensuring code portability, network heterogeneity masking, and sandbox containment.
Notes:
In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.