Bianca Schroeder

Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
bianca@cs.cmu.edu; (412) 608-4675
www.cs.cmu.edu/$\sim$bianca

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research focuses on the design and implementation of computer systems. The methods I am using in my work are inspired by a broad array of disciplines, including performance modeling and analysis, workload and fault characterization, machine learning, and scheduling and queueing theory. My work spans a number of different areas in computer systems, including high-performance computing systems, web servers, computer networks, database systems and storage systems.

EDUCATION

2005-present		  Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. 


			Post-doctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department.


Topic: Empirical system reliability


Advisor: Garth A. Gibson.




1999-2005 		 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. 


Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Computer Science. 


Thesis: Improving the performance of static and dynamic requests at a busy web site 


Advisor: Mor Harchol-Balter. 




1996-1997 		 University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland. 


Exchange student in the Computer Science Program.




1993-1999 		 Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany. 


M.S. in Computer Science, August 1999 


Thesis: Upper and lower bounds for online scheduling  


Advisors:  Kurt Mehlhorn and  Susanne Albers 

HONORS

2003-2005 		 Two-time winner of IBM Phd fellowship




2003 		 Best paper award 18th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2003)




1996-1997 		 Erasmus fellowship for studies abroad

PUBLICATIONS

2007
Bianca Schroeder, Garth A. Gibson. ``Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?'' 5th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007).

2007
Ernst Biersack, Bianca Schroeder. ``Scheduling in Practice.'' Invited to Special Issue of the ACM Sigmetrics PER (Performance Evaluation Review) on ``New Perspectives in Scheduling''.

2006
Bianca Schroeder, Garth A. Gibson. ``A large scale study of failures in high-performance-computing systems.'' International Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2006).
As one of the best papers of DSN'06 invited to IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC).

2006
Bianca Schroeder, Adam Wierman and Mor Harchol-Balter. ``Open vs. closed: A cautionary tale.'' 3rd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006).

2006
Bianca Schroeder, Mor Harchol-Balter, Arun Iyengar, Erich Nahum. ``Achieving class-based QoS for transactional workloads.'' 22th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006).

2006
Bianca Schroeder, Mor Harchol-Balter, Arun Iyengar, Erich Nahum. ``How to determine a good multi-programming level for external scheduling.'' 22th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006).

2005
David T. McWherter, Bianca Schroeder, Anastassia Ailamaki and Mor Harchol-Balter. ``Improving Preemptive Prioritization via Statistical Characterization of OLTP Locking.'' 21th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2005).

2004
David T. McWherter, Bianca Schroeder, Anastassia Ailamaki and Mor Harchol-Balter. ``Priority Mechanisms for OLTP and Transactional Web Applications.'' 20th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2004). Has been cited 30+ times.

2003
Bianca Schroeder and Mor Harchol-Balter. ``Web servers under overload: How scheduling can help.'' 18th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2003). Winner of student paper award.
Extended version appeared in ACM Transactions on Internet Technologies (TOIT), 6(1): 20-52, 2006.

2003
A. Nucci, B. Schroeder, S. Bhattacharyya, N. Taft, C. Diot. ``IS-IS Link Weight Assignment for Transient Link Failures.'' 18th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2003). Berlin, Germany, 2003.

2003
Mor Harchol-Balter, Bianca Schroeder, Nikhil Bansal, Mukesh Agrawal. ``Size-based Scheduling to Improve Web Performance.'' ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 21(2): 207-233.
Has been cited 100+ times.

2001
Mor Harchol-Balter, Nikhil Bansal, Bianca Schroeder. ``Implementation of SRPT Scheduling in Web Servers.'' Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing, 7th International Workshop (JSSPP 2001).

2000
Bianca Schroeder, Mor Harchol-Balter. ``Evaluation of Task Assignment Policies for Supercomputing Servers: The Case for Load Unbalancing and Fairness.'' 9th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC'00).
As one of the best papers of HPDC'00 invited to Cluster Computing 7(2): 151-161 (2004).

2000
Susanne Albers, Bianca Schroeder. ``An Experimental Study of Online Scheduling Algorithms.'' 4th International Workshop on Algorithm Engineering (WAE'00).
As one of the best papers of WAE'00 selected to appear in ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithms 7(3) (2002).

BOOK CHAPTERS

2005
Arun Iyengar, Lakshmish Ramaswamy, and Bianca Schroeder. ``Techniques for efficiently serving and caching dynamic web content.'' In ``Recent Advances on Web Data Delivery'' by S. Chanson, X. Tang, J. Xu. Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2005.

2005
Anastassia Ailamaki, Sailesh Krishnamurthy, Spiros Papadimitriou, and Bianca Schroeder. ``The PostgreSQL Open Source DBMS.'' In ``Database System Concepts'' by Abraham Silberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan, 5th Edition. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 2005.

CONFERENCE TALKS

November  2006 		 Workshop on Petascale Data Storage at SC'06

			``Learning to live with our failures''.  




November  2006 		The 7th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2006)

			Work-in-Progress session. ``Failures in the real world.''




June  2006 		 The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks(DSN 2006)


			`` A Large-Scale Study of Failures in High-Performance-Computing Systems.''




May  2006 		 3rd Symposium  on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006)


			``Closed versus open system models: Understanding their impact on performance evaluation


and system design''.




April  2006 		 22th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006)

``How to determine a good multi-programming level for external scheduling.''




November  2005 		 Workshop on Dependability Benchmarking at the  16th IEEE International Symposium 


on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2005)

``Analyzing failure data from large HPC clusters''. 




October  2004 		 Grace Hopper conference for women in computing

``Improving the performance of static and dynamic requests at a busy web server.''




May  2004 		 CORS/INFORMS joint conference 2004

``Scheduling web servers.''




April  2004 		 20th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2004)

``Priority Mechanisms for OLTP and Transactional Web Applications.''




September  2003 		 18th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2003)

``Web servers under overload: How scheduling can help.''




September  2000 		 4th International Workshop on Algorithm Engineering (WAE'00)

``An Experimental Study of Online Scheduling Algorithms.''




August  2000 		   9th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC'00) 

``Evaluation of Task Assignment Policies for Supercomputing Servers: 


The Case for Load Unbalancing and Fairness.''

INVITED TALKS

November  2006 		 University of Washington. Host: Hank Levy.


SPMgt;``Failures in the real world''.  




November  2006 		 Invited talk in the ASC booth at SC'06.

(ASC is a program of the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)).


SPMgt;``Failures in the real world: Collecting, sharing, and analyzing failure data''.  




October  2006 		 Google Inc., Mountain View, CA. Hosts: Luiz Barroso, Eduardo Pinheiro.


SPMgt;``Failures in the real world: Collecting, sharing, and analyzing failure data''.  




October  2006 		 IBM Almaden, San Jose, CA. Host: Frank Schmuck.


SPMgt;''Failures in the real world:  Collecting, sharing, and analyzing failure data''. 




August  2006 		 HEC-IWG File Systems and I/O R&D Workshop, Washington D.C. 2006

``The failure data usage project''. Host: Gary Grider




June  2006 		 University of California, Berkeley. Host: Armando Fox.


SPMgt;``Understanding failure at scale''. 




June  2006 		 Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA. Host: Kim Keeton.


SPMgt;``Understanding failure at scale''. 




June  2006 		 Microsoft Research, Mountain View, CA. Host: Chandu Thekkath. 


SPMgt;``Understanding failure at scale''. 




May  2004 		 University of Calgary. Host: Carey Williamson. 


SPMgt;``Scheduling web servers: Theory and practice''. 




April 2004 		 Selected as one of two PhD students to give research presentation at


CMU open house for prospective students. ``QoS for databases''. 




March  2004 		 Boston University, Networks seminar. 


SPMgt;``QoS for online shopping''. 




August  2003 		 IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Host: Arun Iyengar.

``Priority Mechanisms for OLTP and Transactional Web Applications''.




July  2001 		 Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratories, Burlingame, CA. Host: Christophe Diot.

``Improving Performance of Web Servers under Overload.''




June  2001 		 Stanford University. Hosts:  Nick McKeown and  Balaji Prabhakar.


SPMgt;``Size-based Scheduling to Improve Web Performance''.

PATENTS

                                                                                                     		  IBM patent filed:  A. Iyengar, E. Nahum, and B. Schroeder.

``Method for Dynamically Scheduling Requests''.



 		 Sprint patent filed: S. Bhattacharyya, A. Nucci, N. Taft, B. Schroeder and C. Diot.

``Method for Assigning Link Weights in a Communications Network''.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

2007 		 Program committee member: WWW 2007.




2006 - pres. 		 Head of a steering committee of researchers from  seven  organizations 


with the goal of creating a Usenix hosted, public failure data repository.




2002 - 2006		 Referee for several journals and conferences, including: TOCS, FAST, SIGMETRICS,


VLDB, ASPLOS, SC, OSDI, WWW, EuroSys, TWEB.

GRANT SUPPORT

2006 - 2007 		 Co-PI on SciDAC grant awarded by DOE to a collaboration of researchers


at three universities and five national laboratories, led by CMU. Amount: $11,000,000

``The Petascale Data Storage Institute (PDSI)''.  




2005 - 2006 		 Co-PI on grant from the Technology Cooporative of Pittsburgh. Amount: $188,550

``External QoS Management Systems for Backend Database Servers''.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Spring 2006 		 Instructor, Carnegie Mellon University


Designed and co-taught a brand-new graduate course on 

``Manageability and Dependability of IT systems''.


Instructor reviews averaged 5/5. Course reviews averaged 4.5/5.




Spring 2002 		 Teaching Assistant, Carnegie Mellon University


Graduate level ``Computer Networking'' class


Taught by: Srini Seshan


Reviews averaged 4.6/5.




Fall 2000 		 Teaching Assistant, Carnegie Mellon University 


Undergraduate level ``Introduction to Computer Systems'' class  


Taught by: David O'Halloran and Randy Bryant


Reviews averaged 4.5/5.




Fall 1997 		Teaching Assistant, Max-Planck-Institute, Germany 


SPMgt;``Combinatorial Optimization'' class for computer science Masters students   


Taught by: Torben Hagerup

RESEARCH EMPLOYMENT

Summer 2004 		 Internship IBM TJ Watson Research Center.


Project: Analysis of Web workload parameters and their impact on performance

and capacity planning.


Hosted by: Arun Iyengar and Erich Nahum




Summer 2003 		 Internship IBM TJ Watson Research Center.


Project: Developed external scheduler for providing QoS for backend servers.


Hosted by: Arun Iyengar and Erich Nahum




Summer 2001 		 Internship Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratories, Burlingame, CA.


Project: Using techniques from combinatorial optimization to optimize

OSPF and IS-IS link weights for robustness in the case of link failure.


Hosted by: Christophe Diot, Nina Taft and Supratik Bhattacharyya




Spring 1995 		Research Assistant, Universitaet des Saarlandes, Germany.


Project: Developed indexing tool for medieval Latin texts in collaboration with 

the German Academy for Art and Literature.


Hosted by:  Guenther Hotz

PERSONAL

Citizenship:		  German.


Visa status: 		    J-1 (no home-stay requirement).

REFERENCES

Prof. Mor Harchol-Balter 


Computer Science Department


Carnegie Mellon University 


5000 Forbes Avenue 


Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 


harchol@cs.cmu.edu;  (412) 268-7893

Prof. Garth A. Gibson 


Computer Science Department


Carnegie Mellon University 


5000 Forbes Avenue 


Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 


garth.gibson@cs.cmu.edu;  (412) 268-5890 

Prof. Greg Ganger


Electrical & Computer Engineering


Carnegie Mellon University


Collaborative Innovation Center 2208


5000 Forbes Ave.


Pittsburgh, PA 15213


ganger@ece.cmu.edu; (412) 268-1297

Prof. Todd C. Mowry 


Computer Science Department


Carnegie Mellon University 


5000 Forbes Avenue 


Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 


tcm@cs.cmu.edu

(412) 268-3725 or  (412) 297-4141

Dr. John Wilkes


Hewlett Packard Laboratories


1501 Page Mill Road, MS 1134


Palo Alto, CA 94304-1100


john.wilkes@hp.com; (650) 857-3568