Gopalan Sivathanu: Homepage

I have graduated with a PhD, and I now work at Google Inc. A copy of my dissertation on "End-to-End Abstractions for Application-Aware Storage" is available here.

During my PhD, I worked in the File systems and Storage Lab (FSL), under the guidance of Prof. Erez Zadok.

Research

My research interests revolve around the general area of "systems" with focus on storage systems, operating systems and systems security.

Dissertation Research
Innovation in file systems and storage has been limited by narrow interfaces between the applications and the storage hardware. My dissertation research explores minimal, flexible, and generic abstractions to communicate a wide variety of information end-to-end across the application I/O stack. While most research in the past have explored tailored interfaces to enable specific pieces of functionality, my research looks at generic abstractions which are agnostic to usage scenarios. The first abstraction I evolve is the notion of type-awareness in the storage stack. In type-aware storage, lower layers of the storage stack such as the disk are aware of the pointer relationships between disk blocks that are imposed by higher layers such as the file system, thereby enabling useful functionality at the disk-level. In the second abstraction, I explore a generic mechanism to propagate information end-to-end through the storage stack. By decoupling the generation of information from how the information is used, our approach provides a simple, yet effective mechanism to encode the notion of a logical application's activities and propagate it as part of an I/O operation.

Publications

Conference & Workshop Publications

Selective Versioning in a Secure Disk System (PDF)

Swaminathan Sundararaman, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok

17th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '08)

Type-Safe Disks (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu, Swaminathan Sundararaman, and Erez Zadok

Proceedings of the 7th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '06)

Exploiting Type-Awareness in a Self-Recovering Disk (PDF)

Kiron Vijayasankar, Gopalan Sivathanu, Swaminathan Sundararaman, and Erez Zadok

rd ACM International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability (StorageSS 2007) held in conjunction with the 14th ACM CCS.

Ensuring Data Integrity in Storage: Techniques and Applications (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu, Charles Wright, and Erez Zadok

Proceedings of the first ACM International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability (StorageSS 05), held in conjunction with the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2005)

Kefence: An Electric Fence for Kernel Buffers (PDF)

Nikolai Joukov, Aditya Kashyap, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok

Proceeedings of the first ACM International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability (StorageSS 05), held in conjunction with the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2005)
Best Paper Award - Short paper

SMaestro: Performance Aware Storage Infrastructure Planner (PDF)

Dakshi Agrawal, Stefan Jaquet, Madhukar Korupolu, Kang-won Lee, Kostas Magoutis,Ramani Routray, Gauri Shah, Gopalan Sivathanu, Brian Smith, Chung-hao Tan, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Norbert Vogl, Kaladhar Voruganti, Li Yin, Omer Zaki

Proceedings of the Academy Of Technology Performance Engineering Best Practices Topical Conference VI, 2005, IBM Toronto Lab, Toronto, Canada

Efficient and Safe Execution of User-level Code in the Kernel (PDF)

Erez Zadok, Sean Callanan, Abhishek Rai, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Avishay Traeger

Proceedings of the 2005 NSF Next Generation Software Workshop in conjunction with the 2005 Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2005)

I³FS: An In-kernel Integrity Checker and Intrusion detection File System (PDF)

Swapnil Patil, Anand Kashyap, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok

Proceedings of the 18th Usenix Large Installation Systems Administration Conference (LISA '04)

Journal Publications

Extending ACID Semantics to the File System (PDF)

Charles Wright, Richard Spillane, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok

Appears in the May 2007 issue of the ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS).

On Incremental File System Development (PDF)

Erez Zadok, Rakesh Iyer, Nikolai Joukov, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Charles Wright

May 2006 issue of the ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS).

Technical Reports

Adaptive Storage Provisioning in Enterprise Class Storage Systems (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu, Madhukar Korupolu, Kaladhar Voruganti, and Omer Zaki

Intern Report, IBM Almaden Research Center, August 2005.

Ensuring Data Integrity in Storage: Techniques and Applications (PDF)

Research Proficiency Examination Report, Stony Brook University

Burning the VFS with ACID File Systems (PDF)

Charles P. Wright, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok

File Systems and Storage Lab, Stony Brook University, 2005

A Versatile Persistent Caching Framework for File Systems (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu and Erez Zadok

Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-05-05

Reducing Redundant Internet Traffic using Co-operative Routers (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu, Devaki Kulkarni, and Mohammad Nayyer Zubair

Course Project Report, Stony Brook University

Enhancing File System Integrity through Checksums (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu, Charles P. Wright, and Erez Zadok

Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-04-04

Implementation of a Log-structured File System for Linux (PDF)

Gopalan Sivathanu, Karthik Rajagopal, and Dwarakanath Raghunathan

Project Report, B.E, University of Madras

Internships

Google Inc, Mountain View (Infrastructure group)

[Summer 2007]
(Details confidential)

VMware Inc, Palo Alto (Performance Group)

[Summer 2006]
Evolved an infrastructure using which a virtual machine host kernel can obtain semantic information about file systems running on the guest operating system through an explicit communication interface. This infrastructure was used to develop a secure storage mechanism that can protect local storage even in the event of guest operating system compromises. (Details confidential)

IBM Research, Almaden (Advanced Virtual Storage Systems Group)

[Summer 2005]
Designed and implemented a storage provisioning tool that uses an adaptive algorithm to perform efficient resource allocation in large scale storage systems. (Details confidential)

Selected Technical Talks

May 2007, "End-to-End Abstractions for Application-Aware Storage", PhD thesis proposal, Stony Brook University, NY.

November 2006, "Type-Safe Disks", OSDI 2006, Seattle, WA.

August 2006, "Exploiting Guest File System Semantics at the VMM", Intern Talk, VMware Inc, Palo Alto, CA.

November 2005, "Ensuring Data Integrity in Storage: Techniques and Applications", ACM StorageSS '05, Fairfax, VA.

August 2005, "Adaptive Storage Provisioning in Enterprise Class Storage Systems", Intern Talk, IBM Research, Almaden, CA.

May 2005, "Ensuring Data Integrity in Storage: Techniques and Applications", RPE Talk, Stony Brook University

November 2004, "An In-kernel Integrity Checker and Intrusion Detection File System", LISA '04, Atlanta, GA

Teaching Assistantship

I have acted as a Teaching Assistant for the undergraduate and graduate level Operating Systems courses in Stony Brook University. I won the Best Teaching Assistant Award for the academic year 2003-2004, in the CS department of Stony Brook University.

Spring 2004: CSE506 Operating Systems (Grad) (Prof. Erez Zadok)
Fall 2003: CSE306 Operating Systems (Undergrad) (Prof. Eugene Stark)

The truth ...

"Whatever happened, it happened for good.
Whatever is happening, is also happening for good.
Whatever will happen, that too will be for good.
What have you lost for which you weep?
What did you bring with you, which you have lost?
What did you produce, which has perished?
You did not bring anything when you were born.
Whatever you have taken, it is taken from Here.
Whatever you have given, it is given Here.
You came empty handed and you will go the same way.
Whatever is yours today, will be somebody else's tomorrow
And it will be some other's later.
This change is the law of the universe

And the theme behind my creation."

-Bhagawan Sri Krishna