When: Tuesday, April 11, 12:15 p.m.

Where: Distributed Education Center (DEC), Lobby Level Collaborative Innovation Center

Chas DiFatta, Chair, Middleware Diagnostics Advisory Group

CyLab Seminar

Abstract:
The Internet has achieved great creative success, opening our eyes to radically new communication capabilities and distributed control opportunities. Yet for all the critical and commercial success of the past twenty years, we remain essentially unable to quantify or trace the actions of services and devices on the network. The Internet is a maelstrom of packets and protocols, an infrastructure built to speed it all along to quick completion, but constructed without detailed measures, without consistency of metrics or traces, with no visibility into how it's operating.

When there is a perceived problem with an application or supported service, a diagnostician must have the tools and information at her disposal to pinpoint the problem with reasonable certainty, in hopes of avoiding the problem in the future.

We propose creating a new capability, one to collect, manage, and correlate log and diagnostic event information to not only enable investigation of problems, but that can also support validation of correct operation in complex networked systems. If realized, the resulting capabilities will provide the visibility to understand, control and validate essential operation in the computing environments we increasingly rely upon.

Chas DiFatta is an accomplished entrepreneur, experienced manager, and researcher. Most recently as a researcher, Chas is leading an effort at Carnegie Mellon University and within Internet2 to study new methods of doing comprehensive end-to-end diagnostics by combining log information from multiple application, maintenance, and administrative domains. He is now chairing the Middleware Diagnostics Advisory Group, development effort (EDDY) and is a member of the SALSA security advisory group for Internet2. In 2004 he was CTO of the Carnegie Mellon Qatar campus and led the technical effort of extending the middleware, system, network and service infrastructure into the new CMU Qatar campus facility from Pittsburgh. This also involved helping to establish a regional GigaPoP and a consolidated wireless infrastructure among four American universities within Education City in Qatar.

Chas was also the VP of Engineering at Ponte Communications, which produced enterprise configuration management software products for layer 2 and 3 network devices. Prior to that Chas was the co-founder and VP of System Engineering of Freeworks.com, an ASP for small businesses, which was acquired by Intuit in March 2001. Before that, Chas served as the engineering manager in the consumer finance division of Intuit, where he was responsible for the development and launch of Quicken.com financial web site. Chas was also the VP of Engineering for GALT Technologies; providing services to the mutual fund and financial industry and the first to provide portfolio services on the Internet. Intuit also acquired the company in September 1996.

Prior to entering industry, Chas was the Network Architect at the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). He has maintained his research interest all through his industrial career. His interests have been in instrumentation and diagnostics of distributed systems. He also had led a research effort to discover methods for viewing traffic and the classification of its behavior of the core, egress and wireless networks at Carnegie Mellon University.

<< Back