Assistant Engineering

Bharath Balasubramanian

********@******.***

pdsl.ece.utexas.edu/bharath

Concurrent and Distributed Algorithms, Fault tolerant Distributed Systems,

Research

Distributed Storage, Distributed Debugging.

Interests

PhD, Computer Engineering Aug 07- May 12

Education

Thesis: Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems: A Coding Theoretic Approach

Advisor: Dr. Vijay K. Garg

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The University of Texas at Austin, GPA: 3.77/4.0

Master of Science, Computer Engineering Aug 05 - Aug 07

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The University of Texas at Austin

Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics Aug 00 - June 04

Mumbai University

First class with Distinction

Fault Tolerance in Data Structures

Selected

Introduced a technique to tolerate faults in data structures hosted on a set of distributed servers,

Projects

that is much more space e cient than replication. Presented the design of these backups, referred

to as fused data structures, and implemented a library of backups for all the data structures

in the JAVA Collection Framework. Further, described an e cient design for fault tolerance in

Amazon s highly available key-value store, Dynamo, using a combination of replication and fused

data structures.

Fault Tolerance in State Machines

Introduced a technique to tolerate faults in distributed systems modeled as deterministic nite

state machines, that is much more space e cient than replication. Using the notion of Hamming

distances, presented a polynomial time algorithm to generate these backup machines, referred to

as fused machines, and implemented a JAVA design tool for the same. To illustrate the practical

use of our technique, designed a solution for fault tolerance using fused state machines in Google s

MapReduce framework, which is used for to model large scale distributed computations.

Accurate Byzantine Agreement

De ned the problem of accurate Byzantine agreement among a set of processes in which the non-

faulty processes need to agree on the accurate value based on external feedback. Presented an

algorithm for accurate Byzantine agreement based on two key ingredients: a standard solution to

the BA problem and a multiplicative method to maintain and update process weights. Provided

guarantees on the accuracy of the algorithm under various assumptions on the accuracy of the

individual processes.

Novel Framework for Self Stabilization

Implemented a new self stabilizing algorithm for spanning tree construction using Neville s encod-

ing. Currently extending the framework for practical applications of spanning trees and exploring

e cient codes for the algorithm.

Bharath Balasubramanian and Vijay K. Garg. A novel framework for self-stabilizing spanning tree

Publications

algorithms (in preparation).

Bharath Balasubramanian and Vijay K. Garg. Fault tolerance in distributed systems using fused

data structures. In IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems, TPDS 2011 (accepted

with revisions).

Bharath Balasubramanian and Vijay K. Garg. Fused data structures for handling multiple faults

in distributed systems. In International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS

2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, June 20-24, 2011, pages 677-688, 2011.

Bharath Balasubramanian and Vijay K. Garg. Fused state machines for fault tolerance in dis-

tributed systems. In OPODIS 11: International Conference On Principles Of Distributed Systems

(to appear).

Vijay K. Garg, John Bridgman, and Bharath Balasubramanian. Accurate byzantine agreement

with feedback. In OPODIS 11: International Conference On Principles Of Distributed Systems

(to appear).

Vijay K. Garg, John Bridgman, and Bharath Balasubramanian. Brief announcement: Accurate

byzantine agreement with feedback. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on

Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2011, San Jose, CA, USA, June 6-8, 2011, pages

215-216. ACM, 2011.

Vinit Ogale, Bharath Balasubramanian, and Vijay K. Garg. A fusion-based approach for toler-

ating faults in nite state machines. In IPDPS 09: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International

Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, pages 1-11, Washington, DC, USA, 2009. IEEE

Computer Society.

Bharath Balasubramanian, Vinit Ogale, and Vijay K. Garg. Fault tolerance in nite state ma-

chines using fusion. In Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computing and

Networking (ICDCN) 2008, Kolkata, volume 4904 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages

124-134. Springer, 2008.

Research Intern, Microsoft Research, India June 10 - Aug 10

Work

Explored techniques to detect bugs in fault tolerant distributed applications, with a focus on

Experience

systematic fault injection. The key goal was to direct the state space exploration in intelligent

ways so as to e ciently nd commonly occurring bugs. Studied the CHESS tool, that is used

for debugging concurrent programs and presented an algorithm to use it for fault injection in

distributed programs.

Research Intern, IBM Research Lab, India June 08 - Aug 08

Designed an algorithm for the SAT problem based on identifying instances of 2-SAT within the

state space of the general k -SAT problem. Modi ed an existing SAT-solver (minisat) to incorporate

this idea.

Graduate Research Assistant, PDSL, UT Austin Aug 07 - May 12

Worked as a research assistant in the Parallel and Distributed Systems Lab under Dr. Vijay

K. Garg. Contributed to research projects in fault tolerant distributed systems and distributed

debugging.

Teaching Assistant, Distributed Systems, UT Austin Jan - May 07, 10, 11

Worked as a teaching assistant for the graduate distributed systems class taught by Dr. Vijay K.

Garg. Helped students understand the course material and graded their exams and assignments.

Summer Intern, Wintegra Corporation Austin, Texas June 06 - Aug 06

Worked as a network programmer, implementing and testing a part of the new WiMax speci -

cations. Ported the Wintegra API for the WiMax Services Layer from their proprietary OS to

Linux.

Teaching Assistant, Biomedical Instrumentation Lab, UT Austin Jan 06 - May 06

Worked as a teaching assistant helping undergraduate students build complex analog and digital

circuits for biomedical instrumentation using the NI Elvis prototyping board.

Associate Consultant, Capgemini Consulting, India July 04 - July 05

Maintained a project management tool that was used across various o ces of Capgemini around

the world. Developed and maintained a web portal that was used to track internal projects of

Capgemini.

Programming Languages : C, C++, Java

Skills

Libraries and Tools : Vim, L TEX, Eclipse, MatLab, GCC, GDB, Valgrind

A

Database Management Systems : Oracle, MySQl, SQL

Web Application Development : HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, JSP, Servlets, Struts

Distributed Systems, Coding Theory, Algorithms, Probability and Stochastic Processes, Digital

Course

Signal Processing, High Performance Software, Engineering Programming Languages, Computer

Work

Architecture, Operating Systems, Communication Networks

IEEE TPDS, JDPC, ICDCS, OPODIS, ICDCN, SSS, IPDPS

Invited

Reviews

Dr. Vijay K. Garg

References

Professor, Computer Engineering, ECE dept, UT Austin

Email: ****@***.******.***

Dr. Greg Plaxton

Professor, Computer Science, UT Austin

Email: *******@**.******.***

Dr. Craig M. Chase

Associate Professor, Computer Engineering, ECE dept, UT Austin

Email: *****@***.******.***

Dr. Christine M. Julien

Associate Professor, Computer Engineering, ECE dept, UT Austin

Email: *.******@****.******.***

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