Highlighted Projects
Highlighted Projects
How we build robust-by-design algorithms
Robusta: how we build robust-by-design algorithms
Heuristic algorithms power nearly every production system — from scheduling to routing to resource allocation — because exact solutions are intractable. Yet, when inputs deviate from the designers’ base assumptions, these heuristics can collapse and perform poorly. Robusta aims to close this gap and help operators create robust-by-design algorithms.
Robusta generalizes our prior work on MetaOpt, MetaEase*, and XPlain from analysis to design.
Towards efficient heuristic design where we achieve quantifiable and confident performance
MetaOpt: A Comprehensive Heuristic Analysis and Optimization Tool
We use heuristics all the time across many systems, including those that are critical to production services. Production systems use heuristics because they are faster or scale better than their optimal counterparts. But practitioners often don’t know the performance gap between the heuristic and the optimal, or another heuristic in realistic scenarios.
MetaOpt pioneers an area of research on scalable, general, and easy-to-use tools that enable users to analyze and explain the performance differences across competing algorithms and to improve these algorithms before they are deployed in high-stakes situations.
FixRoute and RouteShepherd
A Unified Logic and Numerical Tool for Provably Safe Internet Traffic Engineering
The performance of networks that use the Internet Protocol stack is sensitive to precise configuration of many low level parameters on each network device. These settings govern the action of dynamic routing protocols, which direct the flow of traffic; in order to ensure that these dynamic protocols all converge to produce some ’optimal’ flow, each parameter must be set correctly. Multiple conflicting optimization objectives, nondeterminism, and the need to reason about different failure scenarios make the task particularly complicated. We present a fast and flexible approach for the analysis of a number of such management tasks presented in the context of BGP routing.