Bernard Wong

Assistant Professor

Davis Center Room 3514
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. West
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada

E-mail: bernard AT uwaterloo DOT ca
Phone: (519) 888-4567 x31301

My research interests span distributed systems and networking, with particular emphasis on problems involving decentralized services, self-organizing networks, and distributed storage systems.

Prospective students: I am currently seeking motivated graduate students who enjoy building large systems. More information about the School's graduate program requirements can be found here.

Teaching

Winter 2012 CS 454/654 Distributed Systems

Fall 2011 CS 854 Advanced Topics in Computer Systems: Cloud Computing & Management

This is a graduate course on current research topics in cloud computing and management. It is offered as a "paper-chase" course: we read and discuss important papers on different subtopics in cloud computing and management each week. Students must also individually complete a final project that explores a new idea in one of the sub-topics covered in the course. The goal is that by the end of the course, the final project can serve as a starting point for a workshop paper submission.

Winter 2012	CS 454/654 Distributed Systems
Fall 2011	CS 854 Advanced Topics in Computer Systems: Cloud Computing & Management This is a graduate course on current research topics in cloud computing and management. It is offered as a "paper-chase" course: we read and discuss important papers on different subtopics in cloud computing and management each week. Students must also individually complete a final project that explores a new idea in one of the sub-topics covered in the course. The goal is that by the end of the course, the final project can serve as a starting point for a workshop paper submission.

Projects

Microfuge Performance Isolation in Cloud-based Storage Systems.

Cloud computing has enabled significant improvements to datacenter utilization through the consolidation of services from different businesses onto the same machines. The tradeoff to improved utilization, however, is reduced isolation between services, which leads to inconsistent and unpredictable performance. The Microfuge projects aims to tackle the problem of providing performance isolation in the underlying, shared storage systems that often dictates the performance characteristics of cloud-based services.

HyperDex A Distributed, Searchable Key-Value Store for Cloud Computing.

HyperDex is a distributed key-value store that provides high performance and strong consistency for get/put operations using the primary object attribute (key), and provides for efficient search operations on any combination of secondary object attributes. This is possible through the use of Hyperspace Hashing, which maps objects with multiple attributes into points in a multidimensional hyperspace. Search queries on secondary object attributes can therefore be mapped to small, hyperspace regions representing the set of feasible locations for the matching objects.

Cubit Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays.
Octant A Comprehensive Framework for Geolocalization on the Internet.
Meridian A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning.
ClosestNode.com A DNS Redirection Service for Closest Node Selection.

Microfuge	Performance Isolation in Cloud-based Storage Systems. Cloud computing has enabled significant improvements to datacenter utilization through the consolidation of services from different businesses onto the same machines. The tradeoff to improved utilization, however, is reduced isolation between services, which leads to inconsistent and unpredictable performance. The Microfuge projects aims to tackle the problem of providing performance isolation in the underlying, shared storage systems that often dictates the performance characteristics of cloud-based services.
HyperDex	A Distributed, Searchable Key-Value Store for Cloud Computing. HyperDex is a distributed key-value store that provides high performance and strong consistency for get/put operations using the primary object attribute (key), and provides for efficient search operations on any combination of secondary object attributes. This is possible through the use of Hyperspace Hashing, which maps objects with multiple attributes into points in a multidimensional hyperspace. Search queries on secondary object attributes can therefore be mapped to small, hyperspace regions representing the set of feasible locations for the matching objects.
Cubit	Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays.
Octant	A Comprehensive Framework for Geolocalization on the Internet.
Meridian	A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning.
ClosestNode.com	A DNS Redirection Service for Closest Node Selection.

Publications

HyperDex: A Distributed, Searchable Key-Value Store
Robert Escriva, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
To appear in Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference, Helsinki, Finland, August 2012.
It's Not Easy Being Green.
Peter Xiang Gao, Andrew R. Curtis, Bernard Wong, and Srinivasan Keshav.
To appear in Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference, Helsinki, Finland, August 2012.
To Chunk or Not to Chunk: Implications for HTTP Streaming Video Server Performance.
Jim Summers, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, and Bernard Wong.
To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), Toronto, Canada, June 2012.
PDF
Methodologies for Generating HTTP Streaming Video Workloads to Evaluate Web Server Performance.
Jim Summers, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, and Bernard Wong.
To appear in Proceedings of the International Systems and Storage Conference, Haifa, Israel, June 2012.
PDF
Small-World Datacenters.
Ji-Yong Shin, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Cloud Computing, Cascais, Portugal, October 2011.
PDF
A Content Propagation Metric for Efficient Content Distribution.
Ryan S. Peterson, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 2011.
PDF
Dude where's that IP? Circumventing Measurement-based IP Geolocation.
Phillipa Gill, Yashar Ganjali, Bernard Wong, and David Lie.
In Proceedings of Usenix Security Symposium, Washington, DC, August 2010.
PDF
Blindfold: A System to "See No Evil" in Content Discovery.
Ryan S. Peterson, Bernard Wong, Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, San Jose, California, April 2010.
PDF
Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays with Cubit
Bernard Wong, Aleksandrs Slivkins and Emin Gün Sirer.
Cornell University, Computing and Information Science Technical Report http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11651, December 2008
PDF
Quasar: A Probabilistic Publish-Subscribe System for Social Networks.
Bernard Wong and Saikat Guha.
In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, Tampa Bay, Florida, Feb 2008.
PDF
Hyperspaces for Object Clustering and Approximate Matching in Peer-to-Peer Overlays.
Bernard Wong, Ýmir Vigfússon and Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, San Diego, California, May 2007.
PDF
Octant: A Comprehensive Framework for the Geolocalization of Internet Hosts.
Bernard Wong, Ivan Stoyanov and Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2007.
PDF
Geolocalization on the Internet through Constraint Satisfaction.
Bernard Wong, Ivan Stoyanov and Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems, Seattle, Washington, November 2006
PDF
ClosestNode.com: An Open-Access, Scalable, Shared Geocast Service for Distributed Systems.
Bernard Wong and Emin Gün Sirer.
In SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 40, Number 1, January 2006.
PDF
Meridian: A Lightweight Network Location Service without Virtual Coordinates.
Bernard Wong, Aleksandrs Slivkins, Emin Gün Sirer.
In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 2005.
PDF
Meridian: A Lightweight Network Location Service without Virtual Coordinates (Extended Technical Report).
Bernard Wong, Aleksandrs Slivkins and Emin Gün Sirer.
Cornell University, Computing and Information Science Technical Report TR2005-1982, February 2005.
PDF
A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning.
Bernard Wong and Emin Gün Sirer.
Cornell University, Computing and Information Science Technical Report TR2004-1949, August 2004.
PDF
Dynamically Loaded Classes as Shared Libraries: an Approach to Improving Virtual Machine Scalability.
Bernard Wong, Grzegorz Czajkowski and Laurent Daynès.
In Proceedings of IPDPS, Nice, France, April 2003.
PDF

Patents

Geographically Localizing Mobile Communciation Devices.
Bernard Wong, Samir Goel and Ravi Jain.
US Patent Number 7983691, July 2011.
System and Methods for Mapping and Searching Objects in Multidimensional Space.
Emin Gün Sirer, Nicole L. Caruso and Bernard Wong.
US Patent Application, filed April 2011.

Professional Activities

PC member HotDep 2012
PC member P2P 2012
PC member ROADS 2009
PC member ICCCN 2009 P2PN

Last modified: May 15, 2012