I've held a nonfunded (affiliate) position in FIGS since January 1^st, 2010. My doctoral studies research proposition is titled Diversity in Peer-to-Peer Networks. Other current projects involve green or sustainable computing, multipath transmission with forward error correction (FEC), and the University of Helsinki's Computer Science Department's computing cluster.

In general, I'm interested in applied science projects involving diversity and empirical system metrics, specially involving performance and reliability. I'm a fanboy of Bianca Schroeder's recent work.

Diversity of Peer-to-Peer Networks

In layman's terms, my research questions whether a system built of diverse components provides superior reliability when compared with a system built from (almost) identical components. Diversity seems to occur naturally on P2P networks, making them a prime research target. On the other hand, it is difficult to instrument current networks due to the fact that much or most of their traffic is of a somewhat dubious nature. Participating members may have incentives not to make their efforts public.

Research questions

1. Whether failures on real computing systems truly exhibit IID characteristics
2. Do current system exhibit common-mode failures in hardware and/or software?
3. Does diversity help safeguard systems from common-mode failures?

Sustainable Computing

As of February 2010, I'm most active in an practical experiment to measure the feasibility of avoiding air conditioning in server rooms. The research is closely related to Intel's recent results with air economizers.

FEC over Multipath

Fellow student Sebastian Siikavirta and I've been toying with the idea of implementing a forward error correction protocol over (diverse) multipath links. We're still looking for a suitable FEC algorithm to provide the fountain coding necessary for this project. The main problem lies in the closed source or proprietary nature of current implementations.

Contact information

My office is on the Kumpula Campus, Exactum building, room A237. Don't hesitate to pop in if you have questions.

• Official home page: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/pervila/
• E-mail: username at cs.helsinki.fi, following above