About Me
I grew up in the mountains of NC, in Asheville. In 1998 I graduated
from the North Carolina School of Science and
Mathematics, in Durham, NC. I then did my undergraduate work at NC State University, where I received Bachelors
of Science in Computer Science and Applied Math working under Dr. Carla Savage, and a
Minor in Music with an emphasis in
Vocal Performance. In May of 2004 I completed a Master of Science in Computer Science at Duke University with Dr. Amin Vahdat. Since then I have
continued my PhD work with Dr. Amin Vahdat at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science, in Systems and Networking. When
I'm not working on research, I volunteer as a CPR/First Aid instructor for the
Red Cross, sing in local groups, and spend time with my wife Kristina.
(Chip) Charles E. Killian, Jr.
Fifth-Year PhD Student
Office: EBU3B 3146
Research
Mace: My present research is in
tools to help develop and test distributed systems. We have developed Mace, a
C++ language extension for building distributed systems, and a model checker to
test liveness properties of systems built in Mace. We have also built a
variety of systems using Mace, including file transfer (like BitTorrent), DHT,
directory synchronization, streaming multicast, and network coding.
Other Notables
Prior to my work in distributed systems, I did work in the areas of
Gray codes and Venn diagrams. Together with Dr. Carla Savage, I proved
the existance of symmetric Venn diagrams for all prime numbers of curves. The
basis of the proof is a necklace approach to constructing an embedding of the
boolean lattice, and then taking its dual. The work
appeared in the Electronic Journal of
Combinatorics, and was featured in December 2006 issue of
the Notices of the AMS.
Publications
High Bandwidth Data Dissemination for Large-scale Distributed Systems. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.
(to appear)
2008.
Mace: Language Support for Building Distributed Systems.
In proceedings of Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI 2007). June 2007. [
PDF
]
Life, Death, and the Critical Transition: Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code.
In proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2007). April 2007. [
PDF
] Awarded Best Paper
Pip: Detecting the Unexpected in Distributed Systems.
In proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006). May 2006.
Maintaining High-bandwidth under Dynamic Network Conditions.
In proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX 2005). April 2005. [
PDF
]
MACEDON: Methodology for Automatically Creating,
Evaluating, and Designing Overlay Networks.
In proceedings of USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2004). March 2004. [
PS
(Talk slides available upon request)
]
Venn diagrams and symmetric chain decompositions
in the Boolean Lattice. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. Volume 11, January 2, 2004. [
PS
PDF
]
(An article about this result appeared in
Science, Vol. 299, January 31, 2003 and it was
the subject of a front page article in the January 2004
issue of SIAM News. Additionally, this work was
featured in the December 2006 issue of the Notices of the AMS.)
Analysis of Techniques For Building Intrusion Tolerant Server Systems.
In proceedings of Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2003). Oct 13-16, 2003.
Design and Implementation of SITAR Architecture: A Status Report.
In proceedings of Intrusion Tolerant System Workshop, Supplemental Volume on 2002 International Conference on Dependable System & Networks (DSN 2002). Washington D.C.. June 22-26, 2002.
(unrefereed)
Talks and Posters
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