Leveraging increases in computational power and bandwidth to make distributed systems and networks more reliable and easier to develop and manage.

Building distributed systems and networks that mimic the energy-proportionality of biological systems.

Our paper "A NICE Way to Test OpenFlow Applications" has been accepted at NSDI 2012 (joint work with Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University).  More details at the PROPHET blog.  A technical report is already available. Marco will present the work in San Jose in April.
 

We have released our NICE tool for testing OpenFlow networks as open source.
 

Effective resource management of virtualized environments that form the cloud computing backbone is a challenging task. State-of-the-art managements systems either rely on analytical models or testing different resource allocations by running actual experiments. Both approaches face a significant overhead once the workload changes. We introduce DejaVu - a framework that accelerates resource allocation in virtualized environments.  DejaVu achieves more than a factor of 10 speedup in adaptation time for each workload change relative to the state-of-the-art. By enabling quick adaptation, DejaVu saves up to 60% of the service provisioning cost. Dejan will present our work at ASPLOS in London in March 2012.
 

Power consumption of today's datacenters is already significant and threatens to shortly hit the power wall - it is getting progressively harder to supply datacenter equipment with sufficient energy for power and cooling. We tackle this problem by proposing REsPoNse, a framework that effectively tries to achieve the energy-proportionality in both Internet and datacenter networks. The insight in REsPoNse is to identify a few energy-critical paths off-line, install them into network elements, and use a simple online element to redirect the traffic in a way that enables large parts of the network to enter a low-power state. Nedeljko presented this work at CoNEXT in December 2011.

 

Powering the Internet consumes vast amounts of energy, and the discrepancy in trends between the ever-increasing Internet traffic and the slower increase of hardware energy efficiency threatens the Internet's growth. We completed a project in which, in collaboration with Telefonica Research, we take an in-depth look at the problem of greening access networks (predominant factor in wired network energy consumption), identify three root problems, and propose practical solutions for their user- and ISP-parts. Overall, our results show that it is possible to save 66% of access network energy. If applied worldwide, this translates to saving 33 TWh per year (annual output of three nuclear power plants). Marco presented the work at SIGCOMM 2011 in Toronto (video).

 

Nedeljko defended his Ph.D. on Feb 24, 2011.

 

Our ERC-funded PROPHET project officially started on Feb 1! We have two Ph.D. student openings.
 

EPFL students can get involved in one of our offered Semester/Master projects.
 

We offer research internships and master projects for students from FTN  (Novi Sad, Serbia).