Atul Adya

I am currently an engineer at Google working on large-scale distributed systems (my email is my-last-name at google dot com).

Earlier, I was an Architect in the Windows Live Core division working on Live Mesh that offers cloud storage, sync, desktop connectivity and an application development platform. I worked on a service called the Partitioning and Recovery Service (PRS) that allows service developers to scale their mid-tier servers without having to worry about some of the thorny issues of consistency, server addition/crashes, load management, etc.

Before this work, I was an Architect in the Data Programmability team of the SQL Server division where I was involved in co-architecting the ADO.NET Entity Framework. I worked on the Entity Mapping design and implementation along with other interesting issues such as the update pipeline in ADO.NET EF. ADO.NET Entity Framework has a very cool and powerful mapping engine – the paper is available here (it won the joint Best Paper Award at SIGMOD 2007).

Earlier, I was a member of the Systems and Networking Group at Microsoft Research. I was working on the design and implementation of a serverless, distributed file system called Farsite that does not assume mutual trust among the client computers. The system provides security, availability, and reliability by distributing multiple encrypted replicas of each file among symbiotically cooperating client machines.

I have also been working in the area of wireless systems for the past few years. In particular, I worked in the area of wireless fault detection and diagnostics. The goal of this work was to detect and analyze the cause of faults in wireless networking systems, e.g., why does a machine have poor or connectivity, what is the cause of poor performance. Before working on this project, along with my colleagues, I explored the idea of using multiple radios in wireless LAN systems for enhancing power, increasing capacity, and reducing the handoff time for wireless clients.

In general, my technical interests are in distributed systems, database systems, wireless systems, and operating systems. I am interested in issues of consistency and concurrency control, caching, replication, system performance, and other systems-related issues.

I moved to Seattle, Washington from Boston, Massachusetts after completing my PhD. in the Programming Methodology Group at the MIT Laboratory of Computer Science with Prof. Barbara Liskov. Along with other members of the PM group, I was involved in designing and implementing a distributed object-oriented database, Thor.

Professional Activities

• Program Committee, USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2007
• Program Co-Chair, USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2006
• Program Committee, USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2005
• Program Committee, USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2004
• Tutorial Co-Chair, MobiCom 2003
• Program Committee, International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2001
• Reviewer for a number of conferences and journals
• Systems: SOSP, OSDI, USENIX, FAST, ICDCS, ISCA, TOCS, IEEE Transactions on Computers,
• Networking: MOBICOM, INFOCOM, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
• Databases: SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, TODS, HPTS, TKDE
• Theory: PODC, SPAA

Publications

• Entity Framework and Object-Relational Mapping

• Farsite: Architecture and Programming

• Wireless: Diagnostics and Multi-Radio LANs

• Thor: Architecture, Consistency and Caching

• Miscellaneous: Web File System

Entity Framework and Object-Relational Mapping

• Compiling Mappings to Bridge Applications and Databases (Joint Best Paper Award at SIGMOD 2007)
  In Proceedings of SIGMOD 07. Beijing, China, June 2007 (Research track)
  Sergey Melnik, Atul Adya, Phil Bernstein

• Anatomy of the ADO.NET Entity Framework
  In Proceedings of SIGMOD 07. Beijing, China, June 2007 (Industrial track)
  Atul Adya, J. Blakeley, Sergey Melnik, S. Muralidhar, and the ADO.NET Team

• ADO.NET Entity Framework: Raising the Level of Abstraction in Data Programming
  In Proceedings of SIGMOD 07. Beijing, China, June 2007 (Demo track)
  Pablo Castro, Sergey Melnik, Atul Adya

Farsite Publications

• The SMART Way to Migrate Replicated Stateful Services
  In Proceedings of the 2006 EuroSys Conference, pages 103-115, Leuven, Belgium, April 2006.
  Jacob R. Lorch, Atul Adya,  William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell

• Load Management in a Large-Scale Decentralized File System.
  Technical Report TR-2004-60 Microsoft Research, July 2004.
  Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch

• FARSITE: Federated, Available, and Reliable Storage for an Incompletely Trusted Environment.
  In the Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, Boston, MA, December 2002.
  Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Miguel Castro, Gerald Cermak, Ronnie Chaiken, John R Douceur, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch, Marvin Theimer, Roger P. Wattenhofer
  PowerPoint Slides from OSDI 2002

• A Secure Directory Service based on Exclusive Encryption.
  In the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, Las Vegas, NV, December 2002.
  John R. Douceur, Atul Adya, Josh Benaloh, William J. Bolosky, Gideon Yuval

• Cooperative Task Management without Manual Stack Management, or
  Event-driven Programming is not the Opposite of Threaded Programming
  In the Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Monterey, CA, June 2002.
  Atul Adya, Jon Howell, Marvin Theimer, Bill Bolosky, John Douceur
  PowerPoint Slides (Visually shows how contorted the code can get with "classic event-driven style")

• Reclaiming Space from Duplicate Files in a Serverless Distributed File System (Extended Tech Report)
  In the Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems,
  Vienna, Austria, July 2002
  John R. Douceur, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Dan Simon, Marvin Theimer

Wireless Publications

• Architecture and Techniques for Diagnosing Faults in IEEE 802.11 Infrastructure Networks.
  In the Proceedings of the MobiCom Conference, Philadelphia, PA, September 2004.
  Atul Adya, Paramvir Bahl, Ranveer Chandra, Lili Qiu.
  PowerPoint Slides from MobiCom 2004

• A Multi-Radio Unification Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks
  In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Broadband Networks (Broadnets), San Jose, CA, October 2004.
  Atul Adya, Paramvir Bahl, Jitendra Padhye, Alec Wolman, Lidong Zhou

• Reconsidering the Wireless LAN Platform with Multiple Radios
  In SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR), July 2004.
  Paramvir Bahl, Atul Adya, Jitendra Padhye, Alec Wolman

• Characterizing Alert and Browse Services for Mobile Clients
  In the Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Monterey, CA, June 2002.
  Atul Adya, Paramvir Bahl, and Lili Qiu

• The Effect of First-Hop Wireless Bandwidth Allocation on End-to-End Network Performance
  In Proceedings of the 12^th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), Miami Beach, FL, May 2002.
  Lili Qiu, Victor Bahl, Atul Adya

• Analyzing Browse Patterns of Mobile Clients
  In Proceedings of SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), San Francisco, CA, November 2001.
  Atul Adya, Paramvir Bahl, Lili Qiu

Thor Publications

Consistency

• Generalized Isolation Level Definitions 
  In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), San Diego, CA, March 2000.
  Atul Adya, Barbara Liskov, Patrick O' Neil
  

• Weak Consistency: A Generalized Theory and Optimistic Implementations for Distributed Transactions
  Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-786. M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science,
  Cambridge, MA, March 1999. PhD. thesis.

• A New Basis for an SQL Isolation Standard
  Presented at the 1999 Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS),
  Pacific Grove, CA, September 1999.
  Atul Adya, Barbara Liskov, Patrick O' Neil

• Lazy Consistency Using Loosely Synchronized Clocks
  In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '97),
  Santa Barbara, CA, August 1997
  Atul Adya, Barbara Liskov

• Efficient Optimistic Concurrency Control Using Loosely Synchronized Clocks
  In the proceedings of SIGMOD '95. San Jose, CA, May 1995.
  Atul Adya, Barbara Liskov, Robert Gruber, and Umesh Maheshwari

• Transaction Management for Mobile Objects using Optimistic Concurrency Control
  Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-626. M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science,
  Cambridge, MA, 1994. Master's thesis.
  Click here for the abstract

Architecture and Caching

• Providing Persistent Objects in Distributed Systems
  In Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP '99),
  Lisbon, Portugal, June 1999.
  Barbara Liskov, Miguel Castro, Liuba Shrira, Atul Adya

• HAC: Hybrid Adaptive Caching for Distributed Storage Systems
  In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP '97),
  Saint Malo, France, October 1997
  Miguel Castro, Atul Adya, Barbara Liskov, Andrew C. Myers

• Fragment Reconstruction: Providing Global Cache Coherence
  in a Transactional Storage System
  In proceedings of ICDCS '97. Baltimore, Maryland, May 1997.
  Atul Adya, Miguel Castro, Barbara Liskov, Umesh Maheshwari, Liuba Shrira

• Safe and Efficient Sharing of Persistent Objects in Thor
  In the proceedings of SIGMOD '96. Montreal Canada, June 1996.
  Barbara Liskov, Atul Adya, Miguel Castro, Mark Day,
  Sanjay Ghemawat, Robert Gruber, Umesh Maheshwari, Andrew C. Myers, Liuba Shrira

• How to Scale Transactional Storage Systems
  In the Seventh ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, September 1996
  Liuba Shrira, Barbara Liskov, Miguel Castro, Atul Adya

• Type-Safe Heterogeneous Sharing can be Fast
  In Seventh International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems, May 1996.
  Barbara Liskov, Atul Adya, Miguel Castro, Quinton Zondervan

• Fragment Reconstruction: A New Cache Coherence Scheme for
  Split Caching Storage Systems (Looking at the Doughnut and not the Hole)
  In Seventh International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems, May 1996.
  Liuba Shrira, Barbara Liskov, Miguel Castro, Atul Adya.

• Lazy Reference Counting for Transactional Storage Systems
  Technical Memo MIT/LCS/TM-567, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, November 1997.
  Miguel Castro, Atul Adya, and Barbara Liskov

Miscellaneous Publications

• Web File System: File-Like Access to the Web.
  In the proceedings of the 5th Annual MIT Student Workshop
  on Scalable Computing. Wellesley, MA. August 1995. Click here for a short overview
  Atul Adya, Joseph Bank, Jim Napier, Jordan Slott, H. B. Weinberg.
  A longer report giving the details of the design and the implementation is also available
  This work was done as part of the course Computer Systems (6.853) course in Spring 1995.