Jim Plank's students -- past and present

PhD

• Wael Elwasif -- Wael received his PhD in 2004: "The Internet Backplane Protocol: Shared storage for enhanced network infrastructure". He now works at ORNL. Wael has been a co-author on the following papers:
  • Experimental Assessment of Workstation Failures and Their Impact on Checkpointing Systems
  • The Internet Backplane Protocol: Storage in the Network
  • IBP-Mail: Controlled Delivery of Large Mail Files
  • Data Staging Effects in Wide Area Task Farming Applications

  Wael wrote the first version of the IBP software.

• Kim Buckner -- Kim received his PhD in 2003: "Data Access in Wide Area Networks of Heterogeneous Workstations." After a stint at Carson Newman and Oak Ridge, Kim has settled at the University of Wyoming.

• Youngbae Kim -- Graduated in 1996. Although Jack Dongarra was Youngbae's advisor, the three of us collaborated closely on Youngbae's dissertation. Youngbae is currently working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. Youngbae was a co-author on the following papers:
  • Algorithm-Based Diskless Checkpointing for Fault Tolerant Matrix Operations
  • Fault Tolerant Matrix Operations Using Checksum and Reverse Computation
  • Fault Tolerant Matrix Operations for Networks of Workstations Using Multiple Checkpointing
  • Fault Tolerant Matrix Operations for Networks of Workstations Using Diskless Checkpointing

• Gerry Kingsley -- I don't think Gerry is in our department any longer. Last I knew, Gerry worked at CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, AL. Gerry wrote the original code for the libckpt checkpointing library, and has been a coauthor on the following pubilcations:
  • Libckpt: Transparent Checkpointing under Unix
  • Compiler-Assisted Memory Exclusion for Fast Checkpointing
  • Memory Exclusion: Optimizing the Performance of Checkpointing Systems

Masters

• Mayank Saraogi-- Graduated in 2006. Mayank did research on LDPC Erasure codes. Mayank works for Adobe in California.

• Rebecca Collins-- Graduated in 2004. "A Framework for Downloading Wide-Area Files." Rebecca was co-author on the following publications:
  • James S. Plank, Adam. L. Buchsbaum, Rebecca. L. Collins and Michael. G. Thomason, ``Small Parity-Check Erasure Codes - Exploration and Observations,'' DSN-05: International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Yokohama, Japan, June, 2005.
  • Rebecca L. Collins and James. S. Plank, ``Assessing the Performance of Erasure Codes in the Wide-Area,'' DSN-05: International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Yokohama, Japan, June, 2005.
  • Rebecca L. Collins and James S. Plank, ``Downloading Replicated, Wide-Area Files -- a Framework and Empirical Evaluation,'' The 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, Cambridge, MA, USA, August, 2004.
  • Rebecca L. Collins and James S. Plank, ``Content-Addressable IBP -- Rationale, Design and Performance,'' ITCC 2004, International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing, Las Vegas, April, 2004 (IEEE).

  After graduating, Rebecca worked with me for another 8 months, and then started the PhD program at Columbia University.

• Linzhen Xuan-- Graduated in 2003. Linzhen's work was on a portable library for checkpointing.

• Scott Atchley-- Graduated in 2002. Scott went on to be a Research Leader for LoCI labs, and now works at Myricom, doing development, application support and benchmarking.

  Scott was a co-author on a ton of papers -- see the list here..

• Haihang You-- Graduated in 2001. Haihang did more work on Porch and Netsolve. I believe Haihang is working with Dongarra now, but I could be wrong.

• Ansel Robateau -- Graduated in 1999. Ansel's thesis was on performing automatic conversion of MIDI files to Mus files for my Musplay program. After graduating, Ansel went on to work in Chicago.

• Rachel Huff -- Graduated in 1999. Rachel's thesis was a performance evaluation of Volker Strumpen's Porch compiler on various CLapack routines. After graduating, Rachel worked for Environmental Systems Corporation in Oak Ridge.

• Dorian Arnold -- Graduated in 1998. Dorian's thesis was on porting libckpt to Solaris, and related issues. After spending a few years working with Dongarra, Dorian moved to Wisconsin to the PhD program there, under the direction of Bart Miller.

• Lee Hamner -- Graduated in 1998. Lee's thesis was responsible for much of the data in our paper on simulation of checkpointing systems. After graduating, Lee worked at DeRoyal Industries in Knoxville.

• Michael Puening -- Graduated in 1997. Mike's thesis was on diskless checkpointing, and he was a co-author on the Diskless Checkpointing paper in IEEE TPDS. Last I knew, Mike was an Applications Consultant at Cardinal Solutions in Cincinnati, OH.

• Darryl Pace -- Graduated in 1997. Darryl's thesis was on RAID techniques for checkpointing. Last I knew, Darryl was working in Atlanta.

Undergraduates

• John Garrison -- 2005. John worked with me on failure monitoring for IBP. John has moved onto graduate school at Texas A&M, where he has won a fellowship from the DoD.

• Isaac Charles -- 2005. Isaac worked with me on resource allocation algorithms for IBP. After graduating, he moved onto the PhD program at Brown University.

• Rebecca Collins -- 2003. Rebecca worked with me on content-based naming for IBP. After graduating, she worked a bit with Mike Langston, and then came back to do her masters with me (see above).

• Stephen Soltesz - 2002. Stephen went on to be an extremely productive staff member of LoCI, before moving to Princeton to start the PhD program there. He was a co-author on numerous papers, including:
  • Fault-Tolerance in the Network Storage Stack
  • Video IBPster

• Matthew Allen -- 2001. Matthew left to pursue a PhD at UCSB, under the direction of Rich Wolski.
  • Adaptive Timeout Discovery Using the Network Weather Service.
  • The Effect of Timeout Prediction and Selection on Wide Area Collective Operations

• Alex Cruikshank (college scholars advisee) -- 1995. Alex is now (as of 1999) a Senior Software Engineer working for Epitonic.com. Check it out.