Homepage of Sankaran Sivathanu

Sankaran Sivathanu, PhD Student, Gatech Georgia tech

Research

Publications

Internships

Courses

Teaching

Resume

About

Contact

Welcome !

I am a 4th year grad student, working under Prof. Ling Liu at the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. My primary research area is Operating Systems and System Virtualization. I am a part of the CERCS (Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems) group and I work at the DiSL (Distributed data intensive Systems Lab).

I'll be graduating with a PhD in the Spring of 2011, after which I'll be joining the R&D Performance group at VMware Inc. , Palo Alto, CA.

Research

My research spans the broad area of OS with a focus on storage systems and IO aspects of system virtualization. At Georgia Tech, I have worked on a couple of interesting projects on file system and storage interfaces, power-performance tradeoffs, analytical modeling of storage arrays, workload characterization, and analysis of I/O in virtual environments. Prior to this, I worked on developing a content-based file system in the Linux kernel during my undergrad. View my resume for more information.

Thesis : "Enhancing Storage Performance in Virtualized Environments: A Pro-active Approach"

Milestones : Qualifiers --> Thesis Proposal --> Dissertation Defense --> Doctoral Degree

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Publications

Load-Aware Replay of I/O Traces [WIP]

Sankaran Sivathanu, Jinpyo Kim, Devaki Kulkarni, Ling Liu

The 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2011)

San Jose, CA, USA, Feb 15-17, 2011

[PDF]

Modeling the Performance and Energy of Storage Arrays

Sankaran Sivathanu, Cristian Ungureanu and Ling Liu

The First IEEE International Green Computing Conference (IGCC 2010)

Chicago, IL, USA, August 15-18, 2010

[PDF] [Slides]

Storage Management in Virtualized Cloud Environment

Sankaran Sivathanu, Ling Liu, Mei Yiduo and Xing Pu

The Third IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud 2010)

Miami, FL, USA, July 5-10, 2010

[PDF]

Performance Measurements and Analysis of Network I/O Applications in Virtualized Cloud

Yiduo Mei, Ling Liu, Xing Pu, and Sankaran Sivathanu

The Third IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud 2010)

Miami, FL, USA, July 5-10, 2010

[PDF]

Understanding Performance Interference of I/O Workload in Virtualized Cloud Environment

Xing Pu, Ling Liu, Yiduo Mei, Sankaran Sivathanu, Younggyun Koh, Calton Pu

The Third IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud 2010)

Miami, FL, USA, July 5-10, 2010

[PDF]

Design and Implementation of a Content-Based File System in LINUX [Technical Report]

Sankaran Sivathanu, Shankar Sridhar and Karthick Kumar

Undergrad Project Report - Anna University, April 2007

[PDF]

Load-Aware Replay of I/O Traces [Poster]

Sankaran Sivathanu, Jinpyo Kim, Devaki Kulkarni, Ling Liu

The 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2011)

San Jose, CA, USA, Feb 15-17, 2011

[PDF]

Enhancing Availability and Performance in Storage Systems and Services [Poster]

Sangeetha Seshadri, Sankaran Sivathanu and Ling Liu

CERCS IAB Meeting 2007, Georgia Institute of technology, Oct 2007

[PDF]

[In Submission]

PaSS: Pro-active Storage Systems

Sankaran Sivathanu, Ling Liu

March, 2011

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Internships

Summer 2010

VMware Inc., Palo Alto, CA (R&D Performance)

Built a framework that replays I/O traces collected at the virtual SCSI layer in VMware ESX server. Proposed and implemented a novel technique of load-aware replay, where the trace replay preserves original application load characteristics irrespective of the system's capabilities.

Summer 2009

NEC Labs America, Princeton, NJ (Grid Storage Group)

Analyzed power-performance trade-offs in existing power conservation techniques and proposed an analytical performance model for power-aware storage arrays.

Summer 2008

Netapp Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (Advanced Technology Group)

Analyzed the power consumption behavior of the various hardware and software components of NetApp Storage Servers and studied the effect of file systems/workloads on the storage system power consumption.

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Courses

CS6210 Advanced Operating Systems by Prof. Ada Gavrilovska

CS7210 Distributed Systems by Prof. Karsten Schwan

CS6520 Computer Networks by Prof. Nick Feamster

CS6505 Computability, Complexity and Algorithms by Prof. Venkateswaran

CS6262 Network Security by Prof. Wenke Lee

MGT6753 Principles of Management for Engineers by Prof. Alan Flurry

MGT6400 Pricing Analytics & Revenue Management by Prof. Mark Ferguson

MGT6799 Legal Issues in Technology transfer by Prof. Arn Rubinoff

CS8903 Introduction to Graduate Studies by Prof. Nick Feamster and Prof. Alex Gray

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Teaching Assistantship

Spring 2009 - Advanced Operating Systems (Prof. Karsten Schwan)

Fall 2009 - Emerging Database Technologies (Prof. Ling Liu)

Fall 2010 - Design of Operating Systems (Prof. Wenke Lee)

Resume

About Me

I earned my undergraduate (Bachelor of Engg.) degree in Computer Science from Anna University, India after a four year stint at St.Peters Engg. College. I spent my entire school-life at St. John's Matriculation Higher Sec. School, Chennai. I was born and brought up in Chennai, India.

In a career perspective (apart from what I currently do), I am interested in law, business management and finance. I play badminton, squash and closely follow cricket. I am a gadget enthusiast who is quite updated about the latest and coolest electronics around. I am also passionate about cars and driving! Swimming, photography and music interests me a lot too.

About my family, my father is a lawyer in India, and my mother is a homemaker, also good at Tamil poetry. My two elder brothers, Muthian Sivathanu and Gopalan Sivathanu are both computer science PhDs, currently working in Google. Our family is involved in charity activities, most of which through Sri Sivathanu Charitable Trust, founded by my father.