Research Areas

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At SIEL, the need to work in a particular area is driven by the problems we face ourselves. For example, one of the limitations we faced when we began using Hadoop was resource management, and scheduling, as a result we started exploring this area, and the lab has developed its own learning based scheduler. Currently, we are working in the following areas in cloud computing:

• Resource management for MapReduce: Scheduling, task assignment, throttling and federation of resources
• Power aware resource management
• Virtualization and private clouds: Use of virtual machines to better utilize existing hardware, and to provide isolated and guaranteed resources to the researchers.
• Easy to use interfaces for accessing large datasets: Innovative methods to handle large datasets such as web-crawl data, XML documents, and various other data formats.

Background

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The Search and Information Extraction Lab (SIEL) at LTRC, IIIT Hyderabad is actively involved in research in many areas relevant to Cloud Computing. The main motivation behind establishing a research team in cloud computing at SIEL was to enable researchers in the lab in experimenting with very large datasets, which are nowadays becoming a norm in search and information extraction research. To facilitate handling of such large datasets, we began exploring several methods for operating on the data sets using a cluster of machines. Eventually, we chose MapReduce as the preferred model as it suited very well for data intensive applications. We began exploring MapReduce, and its most popular implementation, Apache Hadoop. However, we soon realized that there was huge potential in research in improving the core MapReduce framework in various areas such as fault tolerance, resource management and user accessibility. As a result we established a team that does dedicated research on improving the aforementioned areas in Hadoop and related software.

Collaborations

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The lab is collaborating with Yahoo!, which are the biggest users and promoters of Apache Hadoop. SIEL has developed a very close research partnership with Yahoo! R&D Bangalore. The nature of the collaboration involves research visits from the experts at Yahoo! to IIIT campus, tech talks, and other initiatives such as student mentoring. The collaboration is first of its kind in IIIT-H and has received significant media coverage.

Teaching

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During Monsoon semester of 2008-09 academic year, the course ‘Topics in Software Architecture’ was offered with a primary focus on cloud computing. This year again, a one semester course on Cloud Computing is being offered. This course will be co instructed by Dr. Vasudeva Varma and A. ReddyRaja.

Team

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• A. ReddyRaja (Research Consultant)
• Jaideep Dhok
• Nitesh Maheshwari
• Radheshyam Nanduri
• Vignesh Miriyala