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I graduated with a Ph.D from the CS Department of Stony Brook
University in the year 2008, and I now work at Google. 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, under the guidance of Prof. Erez Zadok.
After a seven year stint in the US, I have now permanently returned
back to India.
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 evolved 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
explored 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, my 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. Swaminathan Sundararaman,
Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok. Proceedings of the 17th USENIX Security Symposium
(USENIX Security '08) PDF
Type-Safe Disks. Gopalan Sivathanu, Swaminathan Sundararaman, and
Erez Zadok. Proceedings of the 7th
Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI
'06) PDF
Exploiting Type-Awareness in a
Self-Recovering Disk. Kiron
Vijayasankar, Gopalan Sivathanu, Swaminathan Sundararaman, and Erez
Zadok. Proceedings of the rd ACM
International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability
(StorageSS 2007) held in conjunction with the 14th ACM CCS. PDF
Ensuring Data Integrity in Storage:
Techniques and Applications. 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) PDF
Kefence: An Electric Fence for Kernel
Buffers. 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) PDF
SMaestro: Performance Aware Storage
Infrastructure Planner. 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. 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) PDF
I3FS: An In-kernel Integrity Checker
and Intrusion detection File System. Swapnil Patil, Anand Kashyap, Gopalan Sivathanu, and
Erez Zadok. Proceedings of the 18th
Usenix Large Installation Systems Administration Conference (LISA
'04) PDF
Journal Publications
Extending ACID Semantics to the File
System. Charles Wright, Richard
Spillane, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok. May 2007 issue of the ACM Transactions on Storage
(TOS). PDF
On Incremental File System
Development. Erez Zadok, Rakesh Iyer,
Nikolai Joukov, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Charles Wright. May 2006 issue of the ACM Transactions on Storage
(TOS). PDF
Internships
Google, Inc., Mountain View (Infrastructure Group)
[June to August 2007]
(Details Confidential)
VMWare, Inc., Palo Alto (Performance Group)
[June to August 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)
[June to August 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)
Technical Talks
February 2008,
End-to-End Abstractions for Application-Aware Storage. Ph.D thesis defense talk, 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. Usenix LISA '04, Atlanta, GA.
Teaching
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.
About me
I am originally from Chennai aka Madras, a city in south India. I got my B.E in
Computer Science and Engineering in the year 2002. After a one year stint at
Cybernet Software Systems Inc, Chennai, I joined
Stony Brook University, where I obtained my M.S and Ph.D in computer science. I
now work at Google.
Apart from Computer Science which is my primary subject of interest, I am also
interested in law and physics. Had I not been into Computer Science, I'd have
become a lawyer. My hobbies include target archery, playing badminton, squash,
watching movies, and listening to music.
I am a fan of The
Matrix :-)
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