I have graduated with a PhD in Computer Scienc under the supervision of Dr. Renato J. Figueiredo. The title of my dissertation is "Self-Managing Virtual Networks for Wide-area Distributed Computing". I have been working for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) since September 2008.

Resume

I completed my undergraduate studies (B.Tech) in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (India) in the year 2002. I come from New Delhi (India). I joined UF in the Fall of 2002, and started with research in Summer 2003 at the Advanced Computing and Information System Lab .

Thats my academic aspect. As such, I am a fun-loving person with a variety of interests and lots of enthusiasm for trying things.

Research

Publications

Industrial Experience

Research

In a multi-institutional collaboration such as a Grid, administrators, application developers and users are faced with several new issues which include (1) heterogeneity of host environments and obscured internet connectivity because of NATs/Firewalls, (2) inability to isolate the impact of untrusted applications from remote users, and (3) complexity involved in configuring and deploying the necessary middleware components make the adoption of Grid technologies by new users difficult.

With virtualization (virtual machines and networks), it is possible to provide an application or middleware the preferrred communication environment for an application or middleware, despite the idiosyncracies of real physical environments. An application envionment consiste of its execution platform and the network over which it communicates with other applications. My research looks at virtualizing both these aspects to support unmodified applications on Wide-area hosts. Here's a list of projects I have worked on:

VMShop

VMShop is a Grid service that allows users to define application-centric VMs, and instantiate them on-demand on any physical resource with a suitable virtual machine monitor. Currently, VMShop supports VMware VMs, and support for Xen is coming up soon. VMShop is expected to be deployed soon with main InVIGO portal (http://www.acis.ufl.edu/invigo) and NCN (http://www.ncn.org). More information on VMShop is available here.

IPOP - IP over P2P

IPOP is a self-configuring virtual network that solve connectivity problems faced by applications in Wide-area. It enables the wealth of IP-based applications to run seamlessly (and unmodified) over a virtual network similar in functionality to a LAN. The IPOP virtual network tunnels the traffic generated by applications over a P2P­based overlay network provided by the Brunet P2P library, which handles NAT/Firewall traversal (through UDP hole­punching techniques) In addition, the virtual network also supports automatic virtual IP address allocation through a decentralized DHCP protocol based on Distributed Hash Table (DHT). The use of P2P techniques makes IPOP highly scalable and fault-tolerant.

WOW - Wide-area overlays of virtual workstations

Together with free x-86 based VMMs, IPOP allows creation of homogeneously configured wide-area clusters of virtual workstations (WOWs) on heterogeneous Wide-area hosts. WOWs are particularly useful for high-throughput computing and cross-domain collaboration, where they facilitate addition of new resources by just downloading a VM image and instantiating it. The use of virtual networking allows applications to maintain IP connectivity even when VM migrates to across subnets, still retaining the same virtual IP address. The WOW techniques have resulted in a VM appliance that bundles IPOP and Condor middleware, allows creation of ad hoc Condor pools on wide-area hosts for high-throughput computing. More information is available here.

Brunet P2P library

Brunet P2P library allows creation of structured overlays based on Kleinberg's 1-D model. The key differentiating feature of Brunet from other P2P systems (such as Chord, Pastry, Kadelmia etc) is the ability to work in presence of conneticity hazards presented by Wide-area environment. The system supports decentralized NAT-traversal using UDP-hole punching techniques. In addition, Brunet supports tunelling of overlay links, when direct communication is not possible between P2P nodes.

Publications

1. A. Ganguly , P. O. Boykin, R. J. Figueiredo. 'Techniques for low-latency proxy selection in Wide-area P2P networks'. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in P2P Systems (with IPDPS) 2010.
2. J. Davis, R. Figueiredo, Y. Sheng, J. Fortes, A. Ganguly , V. Paramygin, D. Wolinsky, J. Zhang, and B. Tutak. 'Application of emerging cyberinfrastructure technologies to aid in the education and training of coastal and estuarine scientists'. Selected for publication in Journal of Ocean Technology.
3. A. Ganguly, P. O. Boykin, D. Wolinsky, R.J. Figueiredo. 'Improving Peer Connectivity in Wide-area Overlays of Virtual Workstations'. Cluster Computing Journal. Volume 12, Number 2, Page 239-256, June 2009.
4. A. Ganguly, P. O. Boykin, D. Wolinsky, R.J. Figueiredo. 'Improving Peer Connectivity in Wide-area Overlays of Virtual Workstations'. In Proceedings of 17th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) (acceptance rate: 17%, Awarded Best Paper), 06/2008 (pdf).

5. A. Ganguly, D. Wolinsky, P. O. Boykin, R.J. Figueiredo. 'Decentralized Dynamic Host Configuration in Wide-Area Overlays of Virtual Workstations'. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Large-Scale and Volatile Desktop Grids (PCGrid) (Invited Paper), with IPDPS 2007 (pdf).

6. D. Wolinsky, A. Agrawal, P. O. Boykin, J. Davis, A. Ganguly, V. Paramygin, P. Sheng, R. J. Figueiredo. 'On the Design of Virtual Machine Sandboxes for Distributed Computing in Wide Area Overlays of Virtual Workstations'. . In Proceedings of the Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing (VTDC), with Supercomputing 2006.

7. A. Ganguly, A. Agrawal, P. O. Boykin, R.J. Figueiredo. 'WOW: Self-Organizing Wide Area Overlay Networks of Virtual Workstations'. Joural of Grid Computing, Volume 5, Number 2, Page 151-172, June, 2007.

8. A. Ganguly, A. Agrawal, P. O. Boykin, R.J. Figueiredo. 'WOW: Self-Organizing Wide Area Overlay Networks of Virtual Workstations'. In Proceedings of 15th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) (acceptance rate: 15.3%, among top 5 nominees for Best Paper Award), 06/2006 (pdf, talk ).

9. A. Ganguly, A. Agrawal, P.O. Boykin, R.J. Figueiredo. 'IP over P2P: Enabling Self-configuring Virtual IP Networks for Grid Computing', In Proceedings of 20th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) (acceptance rate: 23.5%), 04/2006 (paper, talk ppt, talk pdf ).

10. Justin R. Davis, Vladimir A. Paramygin, Arijit Ganguly, Renato J. Figueiredo, and Y. Peter Sheng. 'Simulation of Storm Surge Using Grid Computing'.Proceedings of Estuarine and Coastal Modeling Conference (2006).

11. Ivan V. Krsul, A. Ganguly, J. Zhang, Jose A. B. Fortes, Renato J. Figueiredo. 'VMPlants: Providing and Managing Virtual Machine Execution Environments for Grid Computing'. In Proceedings of Supercomputing Conference (acceptance rate: 30%), 2004 (pdf, talk ppt , talk pdf ).

Demos and Posters

1. A. Ganguly, J. Yin, H. Shaikh, D. Chess, T. Eilam, R. J. Figueiredo, J. Hanson, A. Mohindra, G. Pacifici. 'Reducing Complexity of Software Deployment with Delta Configuration'.Short-Paper at IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (2007).

2. A. Ganguly, D. Wolinsky, P. O. Boykin, R.J. Figueiredo. "IPOP: A Self-Organizing Virtual Network for Wide-Area Environments". International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), 2007 (ppt).

3. A. Agrawal, A. Ganguly, P.O. Boykin, R.J. Figueiredo. 'Towards P2P routed IP Overlay Networks for Grid Virtual Machines'. Poster at IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC), 2005.

Industrial Experience

• Summer 2007. I interned with Microsoft Windows Kernel Development team. I designed and prototyped a new architecture for handling boot-crtical devices in the Kernel Plug and Play (PnP) manager, offering state separation, extensibility and and supporting several new scenarios.

• Summer 2006. I interned with Advanced Operating Systems group at IBM T.J Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, NY. I worked on complexity reduction in deploying WebSphere clustering-based application called Trade6, using pre-configured software stacks inside VM containers followed by delta reconfiguration at customer site. The prototype was based on Xen and CIM.

• Summer 2005. I worked with the Virtual Center team at VMware, on supporting Xen (an upcoming open-source virtualization technology) through the VMware Virtual Center. The outcome of the project was a prototype of Virtual Center that could manage VMware ESX/GSX and Xen hosts. Xen VMs could be created, edited, powered on/off, suspended/resumed through VC. The prototype established the extensibility of VC to heterogeneous virtualization technologies in a data center.

Teaching

• COP 5725 Database Management Systems (Fall 2003)
• COP 4600 Operating Systems (Summer 2003)
• CGS 3063 Computers and Modern Society (Fall 2002, Spring 2003)

My Blogs

Now this is an upcoming geek looking to virtualize IT landscape (blogs).

Music

My taste in music ranges from Hard Rock, Punjabi Pop, Gazals etc to the oldies. Some good sites for such stuff are launch.yahoo.com, www.punjabilok.8m.com, and the well-known www.musicindiaonline.com. For those who love learning lyrics, www.reallyrics.com should be a good place to visit.

No harm trying some of Sepultura, Pantera, Alice in Chains and some of Nu-metal.