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Note
I will be on maternity leave from August 2011 to May 2012. My replies to e-mails during this time might be slower than usual.
About me
Bianca is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department
at the University of Toronto and a member of the computer systems and networks group .
Before joining UofT, she spent 2 years as a post-doc
at Carnegie Mellon University working with Garth Gibson. She received her
doctorate from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University
under the direction of Mor Harchol-Balter. She is a two-time winner of
the IBM PhD fellowship and her work has won three best paper awards and one best presentation award.
Both her work on hard drive reliability and her work on DRAM reliability have been featured in articles at a number of news sites,
including Computerworld, Slashdot, PCWorld, StorageMojo and eWEEK.
Bianca's research focuses on the design and implementation of computer systems.
The methods she is using in her work are inspired by a broad array of disciplines,
including experimental evaluation, performance modeling, workload and fault characterization,
machine learning, and scheduling. Her work spans a number of
different areas in computer systems, including operating systems, file and storage systems, high-performance computing systems,
clouds, data centers, web servers, and database systems.
Prospective students
I am currently actively looking for highly motivated graduate students to work with. Take a look at the kind of research I do
and my publications, to see whether you might be interested.
News
- March 2010: Our FAST'10 paper is featured on the StorageMojo as "StorageMojo's best paper of FAST'10" and on ZDNet:
- Oct 2009: Our Sigmetrics'09 paper is featured in the news! See what they have to say:
- Computerworld: "DRAM error rates vastly higher than previously thought"
- CNet News: "Google: Computer memory flakier than expected"
- Perspectives: "You really DO need ECC memory"
- Networkworld: "Google: DRAM error rates vastly higher than previously thought "
- Ars Technica: "DRAM study turns assumptions about errors upside down"
- BNet: "Google DRAM Study Offers Promises, Problems to Industry"
- The register: "Google: Servers are DIMM witted"
- ZDNet: "DRAM error rates: Nightmare on DIMM street"
- IT knowledge exchange: "Google DRAM study turns conventional wisdom on its head¿again"
- Jun 2009: Our Sigmetrics'09 paper wins the best presentation award.
- Feb 2009: Our Sigmetrics'09 paper got accepted!
- Feb 2008: Our FAST'08 paper wins the best student paper award.
- Feb 2007: Our FAST'07 paper is being featured
in an article on slashdot, which so far has received more than 75,000 unique hits!
It has also been featured in articles at other news sites such as Computerworld, the StorageMojo and eWEEK and PCWorld.
- Feb 2007: Our FAST'07 paper wins the best paper award.
- Aug 2006: We have started to collaborate with Usenix on setting up a public failure data
repository to make
some of the data we have been using in our recent work publicly available and to encourage others to share their data as well.
More updates to follow, once the repository is set up.
Current Research
In my current work, I am particularly interested in very large-scale systems. The number of components in today's large-scale IT systems has been
continuously growing, with installations regularly exceeding tens of thousands of components. Examples include systems at Yahoo!, Google and Amazon, as well
as many high-performance computing sites.
Running systems at this scale brings up many challenges.
One challenge is system management: How do you efficiently manage and run systems at this large scale?
Another challenge is system reliability: With tens of thousands of components, failures are quickly becoming the
norm rather than the exception.
Rather than focusing on one particular type of systems, I like to look at a broad array of different systems, including
for example data centers, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and storage systems.
I also enjoy having a strong real-world component in my work, for example by measuring and analyzing data collected
on live large-scale systems. Companies that I have worked with include Google, Network Appliances and national laboratories, such
as Los Alamos National Lab.
Previous Research
Much of my previous work has focused on scheduling to improve the performance of web servers and databases
and to provide differentiated Quality of Service.
For a brief overview over some of the projects I worked on in the past check out the following project
web pages:
Publications
Conferences and journals
- A. Hwang, I. Stefanovici, B. Schroeder. "Cosmic rays don't strike twice: Understanding the characteristics of DRAM errors and the implications for system design."
Seventeenth International Conference on
Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2012).
- B. Schroeder, Sotirios Damouras, Phillipa Gill.
"Understanding latent sector errors and how to protect against them."
8th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2010) pdf.
- B. Schroeder, E. Pinheiro, W.-D. Weber.
"DRAM errors in the wild: A Large-Scale Field Study."
Sigmetrics/Performance 2009 . pdf.
Winner of Sigmetrics Best Presentation Award.
Invited to appear as a "Research Highlight" in the Communications of the ACM.
- L. Bairavasundaram, G. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. Arpaci-Dusseau, R. Arpaci-Dusseau, FAST'08.
"An analysis of data corruption in the storage stack."
6th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2008). pdf.
Best student paper award.
Short version of the paper appeared in USENIX Login magazine. Extended version in ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) Vol. 4 issue 3, 2008.
The paper has also been featured in an article on Storagemojo.
- Bianca Schroeder, Garth Gibson.
"Understanding failures in petascale computers."
Presented at the SciDAC 2007 conference. Journal of Physics: Conf. Ser. 78. pdf.
- Bianca Schroeder, Garth Gibson.
"The computer failure data repository."
Invited contribution to the Workshop on Reliability Analysis of System Failure Data (RAF'07) to be held at MSR Cambridge, UK. pdf.
- Bianca Schroeder, Garth Gibson.
"Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean too you?"
5th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007). pdf
Best paper award.
Extended version in ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 3 Issue 3, October 2007.
The above paper has also been featured in an article on
slashdot, which so far has received more than 75,000 hits!
- Ernst Biersack, Bianca Schroeder.
"Scheduling in Practice." Invited to special issue of the ACM Sigmetrics PER (Performance Evaluation Review) on "New Perspectives in Scheduling". To appear in 2007. pdf
- Bianca Schroeder, Garth Gibson.
"A large scale study of failures in high-performance-computing systems."
International Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2006). pdf
As one of the best DSN'06 papers invited to IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC).
- Bianca Schroeder, Adam Wierman and Mor Harchol-Balter.
"Open vs closed: a cautionary tale."
3rd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006). pdf
- Bianca Schroeder, Arun Iyengar and Erich Nahum.
"Web traffic analsyis for capacity planning." .
In preparation.
- Bianca Schroeder, Mor Harchol-Balter, Arun Iyengar, Erich Nahum.
"Achieving class-based QoS for transactional workloads."
Poster paper in 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006). pdf
- Bianca Schroeder, Mor Harchol-Balter, Arun Iyengar, Erich Nahum and Adam Wierman.
"How to determine a good multi-programming level for external scheduling."
22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006). pdf
- David T. McWherter, Bianca Schroeder, Anastassia Ailamaki and Mor Harchol-Balter.
"Improving Preemptive Prioritization via Statistical Characterization
of OLTP Locking." 21th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2005). pdf
- David T. McWherter, Bianca Schroeder, Anastassia Ailamaki and Mor Harchol-Balter.
"Priority Mechanisms for OLTP and Transactional Web Applications."
20th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2004). pdf
- Bianca Schroeder and Mor Harchol-Balter.
"Web servers under overload: How scheduling can help." .
18th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2003).
(Original Tech report Number CMU-CS-02-143, pdf).
Best student paper award.
Extended version in ACM Transactions on Internet Technologies (TOIT 2006), vol. 6, no.1, February, 2006. pdf
- A. Nucci, B. Schroeder, S. Bhattacharyya, N. Taft, C. Diot.
"IS-IS Link Weight Assignment for Transient Link Failures."
18th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2003).
- Mor Harchol-Balter, Bianca Schroeder, Nikhil Bansal, Mukesh Agrawal.
"Size-based Scheduling to Improve Web Performance."
Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS 2003). pdf
- Mor Harchol-Balter, Nikhil Bansal, and Bianca Schroeder.
"Implementation of SRPT Scheduling in Web Servers,"
Technical report Number CMU-CS-00-170.
Postscript.
Short version appeared as "SRPT Scheduling for Web Servers" in JSSPP 2001, 7th International Workshop,
Cambridge, MA.
- Bianca Schroeder and Mor Harchol-Balter.
"Evaluation of Task Assignment Policies for Supercomputing Servers: The Case
for Load Unbalancing and Fairness,"
9th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2000) , 2000.
As one of the best HPDC'00 papers invited to Cluster Computing 7(2): 151-161 (2004).
pdf
- S. Albers and B. Schroeder.
"An experimental study of online scheduling algorithms."
4th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering (WAE 2000) .
As one of the best WAE'00 papers invited to ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithms 7: 3 (2002).
- Bianca Schroeder.
"Upper and Lower bounds for online scheduling,"
Masters Thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute, Saarbruecken, Germany, December 1998.
Book chapters
- Arun Iyengar, Lakshmish Ramaswamy, and Bianca Schroeder.
"Techniques for efficiently serving and caching dynamic web content."
In "Recent Advances on Web Data Delivery" by S. Chanson, X. Tang, J. Xu.
Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2005.
- Anastassia Ailamaki, Sailesh Krishnamurthy, Spiros Papadimitriou, and Bianca Schroeder.
"The PostgreSQL Open Source DBMS."
In "Database System Concepts" by Abraham Silberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan, 5th Edition.
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 2005.
Patents
- A. Iyengar, E. Nahum, and B. Schroeder. "Method for Dynamically Scheduling Requests". Filed in March 2004.
- S. Bhattacharyya, A. Nucci, N. Taft, B. Schroeder and C. Diot. "Method for Assigning Link Weights in a Communications Network". Sprint Docket Number 1917/SPRI.98254. Filed in February 2003.
Professional Service
Program committee member
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