[Colloq] TODAY Talk - John Augustine - Wednesday, April 23, 12pm, 366 WVH - Storage and Search in Dynamic Peer-to-Peer Networks

[Jessica Biron]

Title: Storage and Search in Dynamic Peer-to-Peer Networks 

Speaker: John Augustine 

Time/Location: Wednesday, April 23, 12pm, 366 WVH 

Abstract: 

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are highly dynamic decentralized networks that experience heavy node churn, i.e., nodes join and leave the network continuously over time. We model such P2P systems as synchronous dynamic networks. In each round, an adversary can add and remove a large number of nodes, and also rewire the network subject to some connectivity constraints. We are interested in solving the problem of storing and searching data items despite such high churn rate and network dynamism. In the course of solving this problem, we develop a random walks based sampling technique to sample nodes uniformly at random from the network. While it is well known that random walks are useful for sampling, their application in our context is nontrivial because the churn and network dynamism can potentially bias them or even destroy them. Furthermore, we believe that this sampling technique may prove to be useful in a variety of other applications. 

More details can be found in our paper “Storage and Search in Dynamic Peer-to-Peer Networks,” joint with Anisur Molla, Ehab Morsy, Gopal Pandurangan, Peter Robinson, and Eli Upfal. This paper was presented in SPAA 2013. 

Brief Bio: 

John Augustine is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He earned his PhD in theoretical computer science from the University of California at Irvine. After his PhD, he has held several positions both in academia and in industry. He is broadly interested in designing and analysing algorithms. 


Host: Rajmohan Rajaraman