Researcher Microsoft Research Research areas: Cloud computing, data management and large-scale computer systems: large data center systems, networked distributed systems, database systems, operating systems, and security. E-mail: navendu [AT] microsoft.com Research | Service | Publications | Students | Bio | Contact

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Research

My research focuses on designing and building distributed systems to improve their scalability, reliability and energy-efficiency. My current work spans several areas of data center systems, from designing network architectures to managing geo-distributed cloud services.

1. Marlowe: Automated and adaptive resource management in data centers.
   • URSA: Scalable load balancing for large-scale cluster storage systems that aims to alleviate hot-spots while minimizing reconfiguration costs [Middleware 2011 (coming soon)].
   • ACES: An adaptive power controller that manages the cost, performance, and reliability tradeoffs for energy-aware server provisioning [INFOCOM 2011].
   • Volley: Automated data placement for cloud services across geographically distributed data centers [NSDI 2010].
   • CloudSeer: Integrating Monitoring and Policy Enforcement for Cloud-Hosted Applications.
   
   
2. NetWiser: Building scalable, cost-efficient, agile, and reliable network architecture for next-generation data centers.
   • Network failure characterization: Understanding network failures in data centers by analyzing failure incidents and correlating them with network traffic, estimating impact of failures, and deriving implications for designing future network architectures. [SIGCOMM 2011].
   • VL2: A scalable and flexible data center network architecture for hundreds of thousands of servers and built from commodity switches that enables high-bisection bandwidth between all communicating server pairs, agility in mapping any service to any server, and achieves graceful performance degradation under failures [SIGCOMM 2009, CACM 2011].
   
   
3. Cloud Chakra (C2): Developing new pricing and application management frameworks for cloud services across geo-distributed data centers.
   • Batch job pricing and scheduling: A new pricing model and a truthful-in-expectation mechanism that performs efficient resource allocation for executing batch applications on cloud computing systems [SAGT 2011].
   • EOA: Online job migration algorithms for reducing the electricity bill of running cloud services across multiple data centers [Networking 2011].

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Professional Service

• Judge:
  2012: ACM Student Student Research Competition Grand Finals
  2011: SIGCOMM Posters and Demo session
  2009: Open Source Software Award
• Program Committee:
  2012: CCSW 2012, SMTPS 2012
  2011: DISC 2011(External reviewer), ICDE 2011, SMTPS 2011
  2010: Eurosys 2010(Shadow PC), IWSC 2010, DEBS 2010, SMTPS 2010
  2009: DEBS 2009, SMTPS 2009
  (Please submit your best papers!)
• Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Systems, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, IEEE Transactions on the Web, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

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Selected Publications (Full list)

2011

• Scalable Load Balancing in Cluster Storage Systems
  Gae-Won You, Seung-Won Hwang, and Navendu Jain.
  To Appear in the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 12th International Middleware Conference (Middleware '11), Lisbon, Portugal, December 2011.
  [PDF (coming soon)] [Bibtex] [Project Page]


• Understanding Network Failures in Data Centers: Measurement, Analysis, and Implications.
  Phillipa Gill, Navendu Jain, and Nachi Nagappan.
  Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM '11), Toronto, Canada, August 2011.
  [PDF] [Bibtex] [Project Page]


• A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network.
  Albert Greenberg, James Hamilton, Navendu Jain, Srikanth Kandula, Changhoon Kim, Parantap Lahiri, Dave Maltz, Praveen Patel, and Sudipta Sengupta.
  Communications of the ACM (CACM '11), Research highlights.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex] [Project Page]

2010

• Volley: Automated Data Placement for Geo-Distributed Cloud Services.
  Sharad Agarwal, John Dunagan, Navendu Jain, Stefan Sariou, Alec Wolman, and Harbinder Bhogan.
  7th USENIX Symposium on Network Design and Implementation (NSDI '10).
  San Jose, CA, April 2010.
  [PDF] [Bibtex] [Project Page]

2009

• VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network.
  Albert Greenberg, James Hamilton, Navendu Jain, Srikanth Kandula, Changhoon Kim, Parantap Lahiri, Dave Maltz, Praveen Patel, and Sudipta Sengupta.
  ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM '09), Barcelona, Spain, August 2009.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex] [Project Page]

2008

• Network Imprecision: A New Consistency Metric for Scalable Monitoring.
  Navendu Jain, Dmitry Kit, Prince Mahajan, Praveen Yalagandula, Mike Dahlin, and Yin Zhang.
  8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '08)
  San Diego, CA, December 2008.
  [PDF] [PS] [Technical Report] [Bibtex]

2007

• STAR: Self-Tuning Aggregation for Scalable Monitoring.
  Navendu Jain, Dmitry Kit, Prince Mahajan, Praveen Yalagandula, Mike Dahlin, and Yin Zhang.
  33rd International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB '07)
  Vienna, Austria, September 2007.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex] [Technical Report]

2006

• Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of the Linear Road Benchmark on the Stream Processing Core.
  Navendu Jain, Lisa Amini, Henrique Andrade, Richard King, Yoonho Park, Philipe Selo, Chitra Venkatramani.
  25th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '06)
  Chicago, IL, June 2006.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex]

2005

• TAPER: Tiered Approach for Eliminating Redundancy in Replica Sychronization.
  Navendu Jain, Mike Dahlin, and Renu Tewari.
  4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '05)
  San Francisco, CA, December 2005.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex] [Project Page]

2004

• Scaling Real-Time Telematics Applications using Programmable Middleboxes.
  Annie Chen, Navendu Jain, Tadeusz Pietraszek, Angelo Perniola, Sean Rooney, and Paolo Scotton.
  IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking 2004 (CCNC '04)
  Las Vegas, Nevada, January 2004.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex]

2003

• An Architectural Framework to deploy Scatternet-based Applications over Bluetooth.
  Nitin Pabuwal, Navendu Jain, and B. N. Jain.
  IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC '03)
  Anchorage, Alaska, May 2003.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex]

2002

• Verification of Timed Automata via Satisfiability Checking.
  P. Niebert, M. Mahfoudh, Eugene Asarin, Marius Bozga, Navendu Jain and Oded Maler.
  7th International Symposium on Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault Tolerant Systems (FTRTFT'02)
  Oldenburg, Germany, September 2002.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex]
  

2001

• Improving Image Retrieval Performance using Negative Relevance Feedback.
  T.V. Ashwin, Navendu Jain, and Sugata Ghosal
  IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP '01)
  Salt Lake City, Utah, May 2001.
  [PDF] [PS] [Bibtex]

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Students

I've worked with an outstanding group of students:

• Rahul Potharaju, Ph.D. student, Purdue University (Fall 2011).
• Ahmed Khurshid, Ph.D. student, UIUC (Summer 2011).
• Phillipa Gill, Ph.D. student, University of Toronto, Canada (Fall 2010).
• Gae-won You, Ph.D. student, Postech University, South Korea (Summer 2010).
• Jianting Cao, Ph.D. student, Georgia Institute of Techology (Summer 2010).
• Marchel Dischinger, Ph.D. student, MPI, Germany (Summer 2009); Current employment: Barracuda Networks.

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Bio

I'm a researcher with Microsoft Research, Redmond. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin, working with Prof. Mike Dahlin. I received B.Tech and M.Tech in CSE from IIT Delhi. After IIT, I spent a fun summer visiting IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. My research interests are broadly in cloud computing, data management and distributed networked systems.

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Contact

1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 E-mail: navendu [AT] microsoft.com