http://www.caida.org/home/localcalendar/ The CAIDA visiting scholars and local talks calendar highlights dates when there will be visiting scholars or guest talks at the San Diego Super Computer Center who will speak on topics relevant to CAIDA and the internet research community. http://www.caida.org/home/localcalendar/#2008-jun-5_Talk_Harsha_Madhyastha Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT Talk "An Internet-Wide Information Plane for Distributed Applications" at EBU3b (CSE) 4140 11:00 A.M. Applications such as BitTorrent and Skype that are distributed over millions of end-hosts across the Internet are becoming increasingly common. These large-scale distributed applications need to optimize their performance by carefully choosing which paths they use for communication. However, the lack of performance guarantees from the Internet makes it hard for applications to discover properties of Internet paths. Instead of treating the Internet as a blackbox and issuing only end-to-end measurements, I am going to argue in this talk for a more structural approach for discovering path information. I will demonstrate that it is feasible to uncover the Internet's structure and use it to make predictions of path properties at Internet-scale. I will describe the design and implementation of iPlane, an information plane we have built that can predict multiple metrics such as latency, loss rate, and bandwidth capacity between any pair of end-hosts on the Internet, even hosts that iPlane does not control. iPlane's structural approach enables it to predict end-to- end path performance by composing the performance of measured segments of Internet paths. iPlane both hosts a query server that can be queried via an XMLRPC interface, and distributes a compact 10MB annotated Internet map that end-hosts can download to make local queries. We applied iPlane to several representative distributed applications: content distribution, swarming peer-to- peer filesharing, and voice-over-IP. In each case, using iPlane's predictions resulted in improved application performance. Bio: Harsha V. Madhyastha is a PhD. Candidate at the University of Washington. He received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2003, and his M.S. from the University of Washington in 2006. His research interests broadly encompass building networked systems, and understanding the behavior and properties of such systems.