afterword (Ira's blog)

Hi (& DSN, Japan, etc.)

Welcome to my website!

My name is Ira Pramanick and I am the Availability Architect for Sun Cluster, the High Availability (HA) product from Sun Microsystems. Prior to working for Sun, I worked for SGI (on its HA and HPC products), IBM (on its HPC products and parallel CAD tools) and taught for a year in the ECE Dept at UAH. I have my Bachelor's degree in EE from the Indian Institute of Technology, and my Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Iowa. I am fascinated by algorithms in general, and by parallel/distributed/clustering algorithms in particular. Working on the HA infrastructure of Sun Cluster has therefore been very intellectually rewarding. My other passion is availability, which also happens to be my current day job ;-).

A team of us at Sun has done some exciting work in the area of availability benchmarking, which brings me to my second topic (cf. parenthesized words in the subject line). My cohorts in this project are Ji Zhu and James Mauro. The three of us started this endeavor about four years ago, and about two years into this work, we proposed the R**3 Availablility Framework in a Sun Labs Technical Report. We have used this framework to build availability benchmarks, which are currently being used at Sun. Most of these have also been published in IEEE conferences and we hope that this work will lay the foundation for industry-wide standard availability benchmarks. None exist today.

I will be presenting some of this availability benchmarking work at IEEE Dependable Systems and Networking (DSN) conference next week in Yokohama, Japan. In two different forums. The first is the DSN panel, which is on Dependability Benchmarking. This promises to be a very stimulating panel, since the topic is a hot one, and all my esteemed co-panelists from industry and academia have strong opinions on this topic! Perfect for a panel! I am looking forward to a lively audience participation as well. Here's the slide deck for my panel presentation. I will also be presenting more details on the R**3 framework and associated benchmarks during a later session in the conference. That comprehensive slide deck can be found here, together with the paper itself that will appear in the conference proceedings.

As for the Land of the Rising Sun, I am so looking forward to this trip. Never been there myself, but my husband was there last year. He tells me that it is an enchanting place, and is also very different from other parts of the world that he has visited.

Posted at 02:25PM Jun 24, 2005 by Ira Pramanick in General  |  Comments[3]