Jack Lange

Research Interests
Currently I am a member of the Prescience Lab at Northwestern University. PLAB is a member lab of the NSRG (Northwestern Systems Research Group). My advisor is Peter Dinda. My research interests lie in developing middleware systems that enable optimal utilization of large computing and network resources. Specifically I have helped develop an overlay system that provides arbitrarily large and transparent system environments for ordinary users. For this we used virtual machine abstractions and developed a dynamic and adaptive overlay network toolset. I have also worked on circuit switched optical networks and am very interested in the emerging paradigms that they provide. Specifically in that case I am interested in network resource scheduling algorithms and the middleware that allows network path reservations on these and other reservation networks in general. I also am interested in looking at mechanisms that provide a usable distributed memory abstraction. Down the line I hope to be able to research ways of using these services to enable grid service provisioning systems, such as distributed filesystems and on demand compute cluster allocation with high performance network interconnects. My vision for the future is a fully abstracted system that presents a virtual machine interface and runs on top of highly distributed grid services.

In past years I contributed to projects involving Grid Information Service archtectures (URGIS), as well as a host load prediction toolset (RPS). As well I codeveloped a communication diffusion system that allowed zero overhead communication channels between network hosts. There was also a project to build low latency cluster synchronization hardware based on the design of PAPERS.

Projects

  • V3VEE
        An Open Source Virtual Machine Monitor Framework For High Performance Computing

  • Vortex
        Large Scale Distributed Traffic Aggratation for Network Security Systems

  • Virtuoso
        Using Virtual Machines to enable transparent distributed computing

  • VRESERVE
        Using the VNET toolkit to enable dynamic and adaptive network reservation services to unmodified application environments

  • IP Diffusion
        Implementing Zero cost information dissemination by embedding messages into unused network packet header fields.

  • URGIS
        A relational grid information service

  • DOT
        The Distributed Optical Testbed. A distributed cluster environment connected via a circuit switched optical network infrastructure

  • NORSE
        A scheduling network reservation service for MPLS based optical networks

Conferences

    J. Lange, P. Dinda, and S. Rossoff, Experiences With Client-based Speculative Remote Display, Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, (USENIX 2008), June 2008. pdf

    J. Lange, P. Dinda, and F. Bustamante, Vortex: Enabling Cooperative Selective Wormholing for Network Security Systems, Proceedings of the 10th International Sympossium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, (RAID 2007), September 2007. pdf

    J. Lange and P. Dinda, Transparent Network Services via a Virtual Traffic Layer for Virtual Machines, Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, (HPDC 2007), June 2007. pdf

    A. Sundararaj, M. Sanghi, J. Lange, and P. Dinda, Hardness of Approximation and Greedy Algorithms for the Adaptation Problem In Virtual Environments (poster), Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing, (ICAC 2006), June, 2006. pdf

    J. Lange, A. Sundararaj, and P. Dinda, Automatic Dynamic Run-time Optical Network Reservations, Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, (HPDC 2005), July 2005. pdf

Journals

    J. Mambretti, D. Lillethun, J. Lange, and J. Weinberger, Optical Dynamic Intelligent Network Services (ODIN): An Experimental Control-Plane Architecture for High-Performance Distributed Environments Based on Dynamic Lightpath Provisioning, IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume 44, Number 3, March 2006

    A. Sundararaj, M. Sanghi, J. Lange, P. Dinda, An Optimization Problem in Adaptive Virtual Environments, Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 33, Number 2, 2005, September 2005

Workshop Papers (Refereed)

    L. Xia, J. Lange, P. Dinda, Towards Virtual Passthrough I/O on Commodity Devices, First Workshop on I/O Virtualization (WIOV 2008), December 2008 (To Appear)

    A. Sundararaj, M. Sanghi, J. Lange, P. Dinda, An Optimization Problem in Adaptive Virtual Environments, Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Mathematical Performance Modeling and Analysis (MAMA 2005), June 2005. pdf

Tech Reports

    D. Choffnes, J. Lange, and A. Kuzmanovic, Rethinking the Use of Parallel TCP in Web Broswers, Technical Report NWU-EECS-06-15, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, October, 2006. pdf

    A. Sundararaj, M. Sanghi, J. Lange, P. Dinda, Hardness of Approximation and Greedy Algorithms for the Adaptation Problem In Virtual Environments, Technical Report NWU-EECS-06-06, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, July, 2006. pdf

    A. Shoykhet, J. Lange, P. Dinda, Virtuoso: A System For Virtual Machine Marketplaces, Technical Report NWU-CS-04-39, July, 2004. pdf

    B. Cornell, J. Lange, and P. Dinda, An Implementation of Diffusion in the Linux Kernel, Technical Report NWU-CS-02-12, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, September, 2002. pdf

Professional Activities

    Program Committee, The First International Workshop on GRID over Optical Burst Switching Networks (GOBS), 2007