Pradeep Padala's Home Page

Welcome to my home on the web. I am a senior member of technical staff at VMware. Prior to that, I was a research engineer at DOCOMO USA Labs. I received my PhD from the University of Michigan in 2009, under the guidance of Kang G. Shin. Please follow the links on the left sidebar to navigate through my web site.

What's New

[21-May-2013]: Presenting a tutorial on Resource Management in VMware Powered Cloud: Concepts and Techniques at IPDPS 2013.
[2-Apr-2013]: Presented at the UC Berkeley AMP lab lunch seminar about auto-scaling in the cloud.
[20-Aug-2012]: Presenting a poster on cloud placement at the VMworld as part of VMware's R&D Innovation Lounge.
[31-Jul-2012]: Our paper on faireness and efficiency in shared storage systems is accepted at HiPC'12. Read the paper here.
[21-Mar-2012]: Attended the USENIX ATC PC meeting in New York.

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Quick Links

Computer science conference statistics - a hobby project to gather conference statistics (acceptance rates etc.) and present them in visual form.
GENI-VIOLIN - this project is in collaboration with Prof. Dongyan Xu of Purdue University. This project provides in-network snapshotting functionality for entire GENI slices. The challenge is how to do this "live", with minmal application disruption and no changes to application or operating system. See our GEC9 poster for a quick summary. A successful demonstration of nation-wide snapshot/restore was shown in the GEC9 plenary session.
LiteGreen - work done at MSR India to save desktop energy in enterprises. The key idea is to use VM migration to move a desktop running in a VM to a central server, when it is idle. The challenges include figuring out the idleness, consolidation at the server, and making sure that the user doesn't have any disruption. Published in USENIX ATC'10 (best paper award) [PDF].
Automated Management of Virtualized Data Centers - my thesis work that uses control theory to solve systems problems in data center consolidation. Selected publications from the work are below.
- Automated Control of Multiple Resources: The work done below is extended for multiple resources. The theory has been reworked and has been tested pretty rigorously. Published in EuroSys 2009 [PDF] and (ICAC '11) [PDF] (best paper award).
- Adaptive Control of Virtualized Resources in Utility Computing Environments. Describes our first success in applying control theory to allocate CPU resources to multiple multi-tiered systems running in virtual machines. Published in EuroSys 2007 [PDF] [Slides].
- Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation. Describes the performance differences in two virtualization technologies Xen and OpenVZ. HP labs technical report HPL-2007-59, Apr 2007. [PDF]. This tech report got more than 10,000 hits in the first month of its publication and got Slashdotted! The report was also mentioned at multiple places including virtual strategy magazine and OpenVZ blog.
GridOS: Operating System Services for Grid Architectures - my Master's thesis contains a handful of ideas to provide kernel support for Grids.
NCURSES Programming HOWTO - A comprehensive guide to programming in NCURSES and its sister libraries.
LFS: A Log Structured File System for Linux - provides an implementation of log structured file system for Linux.