My research is broadly concerned with operating systems and networking. In particular, I'm interested in issues of custom composition and dynamic adaptation of system software based on the needs of the hardware, application, and user. My original work in this area at Arizona was in multimedia applications and mobile systems, where we worked on the design of a configurable transport protocol, CTP, using the Cactus framework and looked at how to customize adaptation policy in such protocols by composing rule sets that described possible adaptation decisions and coordinate decision making between multiple rule sets. This later work was done in the context of the Cholla project. These areas still interest me and research in them is still ongoing.

My more recent research has focused on how to extend ideas of configurability and adaptation to large-scale systems, for example large-scale supercomputers and clusters, sensor networks, and grid computing systems. These systems present a variety of challenges to system software, as any operating system or networking overhead are magnified as the system is scaled up. Such issues are the primary research focus of UNM's Scalable Systems Lab, which Professor Barney Maccabe and I run in collaboration.

Customizing system software to applications and hardware using the similar techniques to the ones used in Cactus is one approach we are exploring for dealing with this problem. Our goal is to have such customization encompass not only which system software components to use, but also where to put them. Another technique we are researching is a low-overhead mechanism for measuring performance in large-scale systems, which has a variety of applications, such as detecting performance anomalies, guiding system software adaptation decisions, and detecting intrusions (i.e. security breaches.) In addition to collaboration with Professor Barney Maccabe, some of this work is in collaboration with Professors Terran Lane and Stephanie Forrest. You can find links to more specific information about these various projects below, as well as look at my list of current and former students, and publications.

• IMPuLSE: Integrated Monitoring and Profiling for Large-Scale Environments
• Configurable Operating Systems and Protocols for HEC Systems
• High-performance Cluster Communications for the K42
• Cholla, Cactus and CTP

• Liquid Software
• Sumatra
• Scout