Thesis Presentation

This presentation describes three engineering contributions made to Diamond, a system for discard-based search, to improve its portability and maintainability. First, core engineering work on Diamond’s RPC and content management subsystems improved the system’s maintainability. Secondly, a mechanism to support “scoping” a Diamond search through the use of external metadata sources was added. Scoping selects a subset of objects to perform content-based search on by executing a query on an external metadata source related to the data. After query execution, the scope is defined for all subsequent searches performed by Diamond applications. The final contribution is Kimberley, a system that enables mobile application use by leveraging virtual machine technology. Kimberley separates application state from a base virtual machine by differencing the VM before and after application customization. The much smaller application state can be carried with the user and quickly applied in a mobile setting to provision infrastructure hardware. Experiments confirm that the startup and teardown delays experienced by a Kimberley user are acceptable for mobile usage scenarios.

Thesis Committee:
M. Satyanaraynan, Chair
David A. Eckhardt