CSC News
Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, receives NSF CAREER Award
The five-year award is for his research project entitled: "CAREER: New Directions in Managing Structured Peer-to-Peer Systems" and will be funded for five years beginning March 15, 2004, for $408,894.
The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm allows potentially millions of hosts under different administrative controls to join a virtual system where they can exchange resources in a scalable manner and run distributed applications. As a result, a wealth of services can be accumulated and disseminated efficiently promoting a huge economic and social impact. Despite the explosive growth in P2P file-sharing applications, the P2P scalable and flexible architecture has not exhausted its potential.
The key objective of Dr. Harfoush’s project is to address the challenges and opportunities that face the deployment of structured P2P systems. He will focus primarily on the design and implementation of network protocols supporting new services that complement the traditional mostly file-sharing applications, new schemes to locate services, new strategies to serve them that compensate for the discrepancies in capacities and intentions of different peers in the system, and a variety of optimizations in order to improve the users' experience. Also, this project introduces metric-induced topology inference and integration schemes that are used to characterize the impact of Internet traffic on P2P performance as perceived by service consumers, to optimize content distribution, and to support network-aware applications.
The final deliverable of this project is a prototype that will be made publicly available and will be deployed on Planet Lab as a service to help disseminate the investigated ideas and to lay the groundwork for testing new ideas. The prototype will also serve a significant educational role as an invaluable tool in the classroom to bring hands-on experience to students about P2P technology.
Dr. Harfoush teaches internet protocols and internet measurements and instrumentation. He serves on the technical program committees of IEEE INFOCOM 2004, IEEE ICC 2004, ICCCN 2004, and IWNDA 2004. Dr. Harfoush received his bachelor’s (1992) and master’s (1995) from Alexandria University in Alexandria, Egypt, and his doctorate in computer science from Boston University in 2002. He joined the faculty at NC State's Department of Computer Science the fall of 2002. His research interests include computer networking, Internet measurements, peer-to-peer systems and routing protocols.
NSF’s CAREER program is a foundation-wide activity that recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution. Their career-development plans should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
The Department of Computer Science at NC State's College of Engineering has 12 CAREER award recipients.
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