S.O.U.S. project at The Ohio State
University
This site is under construction. Please check back often.
What is a S.O.U.S?
An Internet "Service Of Unusual Size" (SOUS) is a distributed system that
processes millions of user requests per second (typically recieved
over the Internet). Examples
include Google, Facebook (an estimated 50M req./sec.), and even
the NY Times.
Using data from Alexa.com, we estimate that over 60 of their
monitored websites would qualify based on the average workload alone,
and the number is growing rapidly.
The term stems from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride which spoke of Rodents Of Unusual Size.
What is our project about?
Our goal is to study and understand the characteristics of SOUSes from
a hands-on systems perspective. We want to learn about their
design AND their real-world behavior under varying workloads.
How can we get hands on experience with real SOUSes?
The short answer is 1) by building our own, 2) working with industry
partners, and 3) testing real-world sites. We're trying all of
the above. On the first front, we are scaling open-source
services to handle very large workloads. Examples of the services
that we are scaling include RUBiS, WeBWoRK, and TPCW. We are also
building new services that reflect the workload of emerging SOUSes.
On the second front, we are continuing ongoing
relationships with research labs in industry. Previous
collaborations have lead to top-tier publications and to the public
release of a realistic nonstationary trace for Internet services.
On the third front, we are using publically available data and
non-invasive tests to understand how real complex systems are managed.
People:
Christopher Stewart, Assistant Professor
David Ely, PhD student
Ashish Nagavaram, Masters student
Relevant Publications (prior to the official start of the project):
Empirical Examination of A Collaborative Web Application
Christopher Stewart, Matthew Leventi, and Kai Shen
IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (special session on Benchmark Innovation)
Seattle, WA , September 2008
Challenges Facing Tomorrow's Datacenter: Summary of the LADiS Workshop
Robbert van Renesse, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Mike Spreitzer, Christopher Stewart, Doug Terry, and Franco Travostino
Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware
Yorktown, NY , September 2008
A Dollar From 15 Cents: Cross-Platform Management for Internet Services
Christopher Stewart, Terence Kelly, Alex Zhang, and Kai Shen
USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Boston, MA , June 2008
Exploiting Nonstationarity For Performance Prediction
Christopher Stewart, Terence Kelly, and Alex Zhang
European Conference on Computer Systems
Lisbon, Portugal , March 2007
Performance Modeling and System Management for Multi-component Online Services
Christopher Stewart and Kai Shen
Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Boston, MA , May 2005
