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@1,452ft above Chicago
Virajith Jalaparti

PhD Student
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL, 61820

Email:   jalapar1 [AT] illinois [DOT] edu

I am a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I joined CS@UIUC in Fall'09.

I am currently working with Prof. Matthew Caesar on dealing with issues of resource allocation, manageability and diagnosability of data-center and ISP networks.

I was a summer intern at MSR Cambridge during the summer of 2011 where I worked with Hitesh Ballani and Thomas Karagiannis. Earlier, I interned at AT&T Research Labs during the summer of 2010 where I worked with Kobus van der Merwe, Jeffery Pang and Seungjoon Lee.

Prior to coming to UIUC, I did my under-graduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur . I graduated from IIT Kanpur in May 2009 with a B.Tech degree in Computer Science & Engineering.

I am interested in various issues of Networked Systems including routing, reliability, diagnosability and security, especially in large-scale networks like the Internet.


[ Research Interests | Education |Publications | Projects | Awards | Curriculum Vitae | Courses ]

Research Interests

My current research focuses on designing, building, and analyzing new techniques for improving the reliability, manageability and diagnosability of large-scale distributed systems and network architectures (esp. the Internet and data-centers). I am also interested in the various security aspects of such systems. I am also interested in Game Theory, Network algorithms and other theoretical aspects on Computer Science that can help in modeling, designing and building real-world systems.
I am interested in working on making networks work!

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Education
Publications

  • Private Anomaly Detection Across ISP Networks (PDF)
    • Shishir Nagaraja, Virajith Jalaparti, Matthew Caesar and Nikita Borisov.
    Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), July 2011.

  • Guaranteeing BGP Stability With a Few Extra Paths (PDF)
    Rachit Agarwal, Virajith Jalaparti, Matthew Caesar and P. Brighten Godfrey.
    30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), June 2010.

    • Under submission
  • OGRE: A Cloud Platform for Seamless Wide area Migration of Networked Games
    Virajith Jalaparti, Matthew Caesar, Seungjoon Lee, Jeffrey Pang and Jacobus Van der Merwe

  • DEFINED: Deterministic Execution for Interactive Network Debugging
    Virajith Jalaparti, Chia-Chi Lin, Matthew Caesar and Jacobus Van der Merwe

  • Datacenter job allocation exploiting resource malleability.
    (in collaboration with MSR, Cambridge)

    • Posters

  • P3CA: Privacy Preserving Traffic Anomaly Detection for ISP Networks ( Extended Abstract )(Poster)
    Virajith Jalaparti, Shishir Nagaraja, Matthew Caesar and Nikita Borisov.
    Poster Session of the 7th Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2010.

    • Technical Reports/Manuscripts

  • Cloud Resource Allocations Games (Tech report)
    Virajith Jalaparti, Giang Nguyen, Indranil Gupta and Matthew Caesar

  • Design for Tussle: The Case of Multipath Interdomain Routing
    Rachit Agarwal, Virajith Jalaparti, P. Brighten Godfrey. December 2009.

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    Awards

    The following is a list of awards I had received:
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    Current/Recent Projects
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    Courses at UIUC
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    Details of various projects

     Optimal Game Relocation Environment
    Dr. Jacobus van der Merwe (AT&T), Dr. Jeffery Pang (AT&T), Dr. Seungjoon Lee (AT&T) and Prof. Matthew Caesar

    Highly interactive network applications such as online games are rapidly growing in popularity, but remain challenging to support due to their inherent need for very low latency. In particular, the unpredictability of a game's popularity (and therefore, load) makes provisioning servers that maintain acceptable latency and scale difficult. Furthermore, existing cloud computing services are insufficient to support dynamic provisioning of many games because players cannot always be satisfied by spinning up a new nearby server; e.g., he may want to play with others already in the game. While some middleware solutions have been proposed, they all require substantial changes in the way that game developers architect their games. In this work, we explore how different primitives can be provides by the network so that online game providers can provide the best possible performance to their clients.
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    P3CA: Private Anomaly detection across ISP networks
    Joint work with Dr. Shishir Nagaraj, Prof. Matthew Caesar and Prof. Nikita Borisov

    Detection of malicious traffic in the Internet would be much easier if ISP networks shared their traffic traces. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms require a high level of detail to be revealed, and this information is considered extremely private by operators. To address this, we propose an algorithm that allows ISPs to cooperatively detect anomalies without requiring them to reveal private traffic information. We leverage secure multiparty computation to design a variant of \emph{principal component analysis} (PCA) that limits information propagation across domains. PCA is a well-proven technique for isolating anomalies on network traffic, and we target a design that retains its scalability and accuracy. To validate our approach, we evaluated an implementation of our design against traces from the Abilene Internet2 IP backbone network as well as synthetic traces, and conclude that privacy-preserving anomaly detection shows promise as a key element of a wider network anomaly detection framework. In the presence of increasingly serious threats from modern networked malware, our work provides a first step towards enabling larger-scale cooperation across ISPs in the presence of privacy concerns.
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    Interactive Debugging for Large Scale Networks
    Joint work with Prof. Matthew Caesar and Dr. Jacobus van der Merwe (AT&T) (and Chia-Chi Lin)

    Modern day networks, like the Internet, are complex distributed systems and employ highly intricate software for their operation. However, imperfections (bugs) in these softwares lead to various hard to reproduce anomalies and failures. In this project, we take the position that humans fundamentally must be involved (at least to some extent) in the debugging process and providing them with in-network support for debugging makes their task simpler.We designed and implemented a network-layer substrate for interactive debugging that allows for tight controls on network execution, to provide reproducibility and performance isolation of the live network in highly distributed and dynamic environments.
    More details of this work can be found here.
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    (In)Stability of Inter-domain Multi-path Routing
    Joint work with Prof. P. Brighten Godfrey (and Rachit Agarwal)

    While multipath routing has been proposed as a solution to increase the reliability and efficiency of the Internet by exploiting the path diversity present in it, the stability of such routing has mostly been unexplored. In this project, we investigate the effect of policy autonomy exercised by ASes, which has been known to result in persistent oscillations in BGP, on the stability of multipath routing protocols. We formulate algorithms to detect instability and to stabilize multipath routing by revoking some autonomy from the various ASes in dispute and showed through simulations that naive multipath routing protocols can suffer from a greater instability as compared to single path routing. We found that while there exist networks which can be stabilized using multiple paths, there also exist networks for which multipath routing could result in persistent oscillations even tough single path routing is stable. These results are quite counter to what has been widely believed i.e. multipath routing can lead to much greater stability as compared to single path routing. We are currently looking at various issues in this domain.
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    Stable Path(s) Assignment for Interdomain Routing
    Joint work Prof. P. Brighten Godfrey and Prof. Matthew Caesar (and Rachit Agarwal)

    The policy autonomy exercised by the various ASes in the Internet may result in persistent oscillations in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Based on the observation that these oscillations are caused because of the interdependence of routes chosen by the ASes and that these dependencies can be broken by making some ASes advertise multiple paths, we propose a solution to resolve the conflicts of policy autonomy and achieve stability. We designed a centralized algorithm and a distributed protocol that detects and eliminates persistent oscillations by assigning multiple paths to a few ASes in the network. Using simulations on the AS graph, we show that our algorithm assigns at most two paths to any AS in the network, while assigning a single path in absence of persistent oscillations. Our evaluation results suggest that our algorithm can effectively detect networks that have a stable state but can potentially face persistent oscillations, and assigns a single path to the ASes in such networks.
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    Last Updated: Jan 12, 2012.