CS&E Profile: Abhishek Chandra

Operating Systems, Computer Networking, and Distributed Systems.

Ph.D. 2004, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

M.S. 2000, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

B.Tech. 1997, Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India

About

Associate Professor Chandra's research focuses on Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, and Computer Networking. He has close to 20 authored or co-authored publications, including journal and conference papers and technical reports. Chandra won a best student paper award in 2005 at IEEE's International Conference on Autonomic Computing. He was also nominated for an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, USENIX, and serves on several conference program committees.

Research

My main areas of interest are Operating Systems, Computer Networking, and Distributed Systems. I am particularly interested in resource management, scheduling, and performance evaluation of systems. My research involves providing system support for diverse applications, such as multimedia and Web services, and my goal is to make computer systems robust and self-managing.

Recent years have seen the emergence of several new applications and technologies in the domains of Web, e-commerce, multimedia, and personal computing. These next-generation applications and systems present several new challenges for operating systems that include meeting application performance guarantees, and providing them with a high degree of robustness and reliability. My research involves developing operating system resource management techniques geared towards meeting some of these challenges.

In my prior research, I have focused on large servers and hosting platform environments. As part of this research, I have developed self-managing servers: servers that automate the allocation of resources by adapting to dynamically changing workloads. I have also designed and implemented scheduling and resource management mechanisms in the Linux kernel to support predictable allocation in such environments. My research methodology includes a combination of modeling, system implementation and evaluation. My ultimate objective is to design and implement systems mechanisms and techniques that would support diverse applications under diverse conditions in a seamless manner.