ON THIS PAGE:

Soon-to-be-Famous People of DiRT

Projects, Publications, and Other Goodies

Research Sponsors

Forgive our shabby appearance but we're too busy doing cutting edge research to create a sexier home page. Either that or we're too lazy, I forget which.

DiRT stands for DIstributed and Real-Time systems. Our purpose in life is to understand how to better build, you guessed it, distributed real-time systems.

We take as our driving problem that of supporting collaboration among geographically distributed groups of technical professionals. For example we're currently working with a distributed virtual environment research group (the nanoManipulator team) to provide quality-of-service for the real-time flows generated by these applications.

We are investigating technology for realizing differentiated services based on combinations of active router-queue management and packet scheduling. The goal is understand the interplay between the requirements for congestion control and quality-of-service, and the mechanisms used to realize each.

Current research projects include:

• Active queue management for multimedia networking
• TCP congestion control with GPS synchronized clocks
• Traffic measurement and charcterization of the NC GigaPOP
• Adaptive, rate-based scheduling
• Proportional share resource allocation in real-time operating systems
• Tuning RED for web traffic

Graduate students ("DiRTsters") Felix Hernandez and Alex Blate.
(See the rest of the DiRTsters in action!)

The soon-to-be-famous people of DiRT are:

Faculty: "Untainted by scandal"

• Kevin Jeffay -- Fearless leader, purveyor of truth & virtue. Unfortunately, doesn't consider beer runs as progress towards degree.
• F. Donelson Smith -- The grown-up that we can't get out of our sandbox. Left high-paying job with IBM to join us. (So how smart can he really be?)
• James Anderson -- A theoretician in a systems person's clothing or a systems guy who is just too smart for his own good? Meet him and learn the shocking truth...
• Sanjoy Baruah -- Scheduling whiz and all round learned person. However he's never gotten over the fact that he was not the flag-boy in his high school.
• Ketan Mayer-Patel -- The new kid on the block. The North Carolina DOT officially lists his hair color as "bald."
• Bert Dempsey -- A closet computer scientist hiding amidst the librarians. Still waiting for XTP to take over the world.

• Mark Parris -- Lab night manager, chases plastic disks for fun, hopes to graduate before funding runs out, lusts after Marsha Brady.
• Michele Clark -- DiRT's version of a Southern Belle. Knows more about Louisiana than one would think is possible to know.
• David Ott -- Night owl in training. Probably sniffing your packets while you are reading this.
• Ramkumar Parameswaran -- Ours COTS software and multimedia guru. Aspires to be a nanoManipulator.
• Alex Blate -- Winner of the Mr. Congeniality award three years running. Also telecommunications director for the DiRT group.
• Felix Hernandez -- The first DiRTster with no obvious personalty flaws? This requires further investigation...

• Soon to be distinguished Alumni...

• Real-Time Systems
• Computer Networking
• Multimedia Systems
• Computer-Supported Collaborative Work

• List of all DiRT papers stored on-line

• Theses & dissertations of past students
• List of on-line talks related to the above research topics
• The infamous DiRT photo gallery

• Data for the UNC HTTP traffic model (for synthetic HTTP traffic generation)
• On-line proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Resource Allocation Problems in Multimedia Systems and NOSSDAV 2000

• IEEE TC on Real-Time Systems home page
• ACM Strategic Directions in Computing -- Real-Time Working Group Home Page

Research Sponsors...
Our research has been supported in parts by:

• IBM
• NSF
• ARPA
• UNC
• Intel

For Internal Use Only: Notes and documents on the infrastructure shared among the DiRTsters.