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Soon-to-be-Famous People of DiRT

Projects, Publications, and Other Goodies

Research Sponsors

  Welcome to the UNC DiRT group's home page!

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.
Students:
  • 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...
Projects, publications, and other goodies...
For slightly more useful information on what we actually do and have done in the past, as well as really dull papers we have written, click on one of...

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.

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Department of Computer Science
Campus Box 3175, Sitterson Hall
College of Arts & Sciences
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175 USA
Phone: (919) 962-1700
Fax: (919) 962-1799

Content Manager: jeffay at cs.unc.edu
Server Manager: webmaster@cs.unc.edu
Last Content Review: 14 May 2000