Last updated: March 2013
Charles E. Killian, Jr.
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
ckillian
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone: 765-831-2447
URL: http://chip.kcubes.com/
Education
2004 - 2008
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA
Advisor: Dr. Amin Vahdat
2002 - 2004
M.S. Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC
Advisor: Dr. Amin Vahdat
1998 - 2002
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Applied Math, N.C. State University, Raleigh, NC
Undergraduate Research Advisor: Dr. Carla Savage
Degrees with honors, graduated Summa Cum Laude, GPA: 3.890
Minor in Vocal Performance
Research Interests
Distributed systems, security and dependability, model checking, programming languages, overlay networks, P2P networks, operating systems, network security. Recent work involves developing a compiler to eliminate tedious and repetitive programming, reduce bugs, and add structure to systems building enabling analyses with a wide range of development tools.
Experience
2012 -
Senior Software Engineer. Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Platforms Networking
Making networks better and faster.
2008 - 2012
Assistant Professor. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Department of Computer Science
Research in reducing the barriers to building correct, high-performance distributed systems. This work continues as an adjunct position to facilitate continued supervision of my Purdue students.
2002 - 2008
Graduate Research. Mace: Toolkit, language, and runtime for building robust, large-scale distributed systems.,
University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Formerly Duke University, Department of Computer Science
Research in reducing the barriers to building correct, high-performance distributed systems.
Summer 2004
Summer Internship. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
Systems and Networking, Singularity Project
Research in operating systems and resource management. Singularity is a prototype research OS kernel built from managed code with goals of revisiting how we would design the kernel if we were starting from scratch with modern tools and compilers. I implemented a real-time CPU scheduler and prepared the system for a broader resource management framework.
2001 - 2004
Undergraduate Research. Venn Diagrams, Gray Codes and Combinatorial Structures,
N.C. State University, Department of Computer Science
Research in Venn diagrams, Gray codes and combinatorial structures with Dr. Carla Savage. Proved symmetric Venn diagrams exist for all numbers 'n' of curves where 'n' is prime. Additional work with Frank Ruskey and Mark Weston of University of Victoria in finding half-simple symmetric Venn diagrams. Also proved properties of a new class of Gray codes we are calling antipodal Gray codes.
2001 - 2003
Network Research Engineer. SITAR: Scalable Intrusion Tolerant Architecture for Distributed Services, RTP, NC
Advanced Networking Research, MCNC-RDI
Helped research and develop SITAR. Led the initial prototyping effort, developed the communication architecture, created a modular infrastructure.
Summer 2000
Network Analyst. AT&T Solutions, Durham, NC
Monitored Merrill Lynch's global network, proactively isolating network problems and errors. Wrote a client-server application and graphical front-end to help monitor these problems.
Spring 2000
Software Developer. Infopike, Raleigh, NC
Developed Jasmine Workbench-II using visual C++. Workbench is a code editor and database manager for the Jasmine database, similar in style and utility to Microsoft's Visual C++.
Teaching
Fall 2012
CS42200: Computer Networking (undergraduate), Purdue University
Spring 2012
CS25200: Systems Programming, Purdue University
Fall 2011
CS53600: Data communications and Computer Networks, Purdue University
Fall 2011
CS59100-DSN: Distributed Systems and Networking Seminar, Purdue University
1-credit reading group seminar for students with interests in distributed systems and networking.
Spring 2011
CS50300: Operating Systems (graduate), Purdue University
Fall 2010
CS35400: Operating Systems (undergraduate), Purdue University
Spring 2010
CS50500: Distributed Systems, Purdue University
Fall 2009
Systems and Networking Seminar, Purdue University
Created as formal 1-credit course in Spring 2009. Involves about twenty graduate students.
Fall 2009
CS536: Data communications and Computer Networks, Purdue University
Spring 2009
CS536: Data communications and Computer Networks, Purdue University
Fall 2008
CS590N: Data Center Architecture, Purdue University
Graduate seminar covering recent papers in data center related topics.
Publications
Endadul Hoque, Hyojeong Lee, Rahul Potharaju, Charles Killian, and Cristina Nita-Rotaru. Adversarial Testing of Wireless Routing Implementations. In proceedings of 6th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec 2013). Budapest, Hungary. Short paper. (to appear) 17-19 April, 2013.
Wei-Chiu Chuang, Bo Sang, Charles Killian, and Milind Kulkarni. Programming Model Support for Dependable, Elastic Cloud Applications. In proceedings of Eigth Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep 2012). Hollywood, CA. Colocated with OSDI 2012. 7 October, 2012.
Sunghwan Yoo, Charles Killian, Terence Kelly, Hyoun Kyu Cho, and Steve Plite. Composable Reliability for Asynchronous Systems. In proceedings of 2012 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '12). Boston, MA. 13-15 June, 2012.
Karthik Nagaraj, Charles Killian, and Jennifer Neville. Structured Comparative Analysis of Systems Logs to Diagnose Performance Problems. In proceedings of 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '12). San Jose, CA. 25-27 April, 2012.
Hyojeong Lee, Jeff Seibert, Charles Killian, and Cristina Nita-Rotaru. Gatling: Automatic Attack Discovery in Large-Scale Distributed Systems. In proceedings of 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2012). San Diego, CA. 5-8 February, 2012.
Charles Killian. Distributed Algorithms in Structured, Event-Driven Languages. In proceedings of Workshop on Languages for Distributed Algorithms (LADA 2012). Philadelphia, PA. 23-24 January, 2012.
Karthik Nagaraj, Hitesh Khandelwal, Charles Killian, and Ramana Kompella. Hierarcy-Aware Distributed Overlays in Data Centers using DC2. In proceedings of Fourth International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS 2012). Bangalore, India. 3-7 January, 2012.
David Zage, Charles Killian, and Cristina Nita-Rotaru. Removing the Blinders: Using Information to Mitigate Adversaries in Adaptive Overlays. In proceedings of 5th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2011). Milan, Italy. 6-8 September, 2011.
Sunghwan Yoo, Hyojeong Lee, Charles Killian, and Milind Kulkarni. InContext: Simple Parallelism for Distributed Applications. In proceedings of 20th International ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2011). San Jose, CA. 8-11 June, 2011.
Charles Killian, Karthik Nagaraj, Salman Pervez, Ryan Braud, James W. Anderson, and Ranjit Jhala. Finding Latent Performance Bugs in Systems Implementations. In proceedings of Eightteenth International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2010). Santa Fe, NM. 7-11 November, 2010.
Darren Dao, Jeannie Albrecht, Charles Killian, and Amin Vahdat. Live Debugging of Distributed Systems. In proceedings of International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC 2009). March, 2009. [ PDF ]
Dejan Kostic, Alex C. Snoeren, Amin Vahdat, Ryan Braud, Charles Killian, Jeannie Albrecht, James W. Anderson, Adolfo Rodriguez, and Erik Vandekieft. High Bandwidth Data Dissemination for Large-scale Distributed Systems. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 26(1). 2008.
Charles Killian, James W. Anderson, Ryan Braud, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat. Mace: Language Support for Building Distributed Systems. In proceedings of Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI 2007). June 2007. [ PDF ]
Charles Killian, James W. Anderson, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat. Life, Death, and the Critical Transition: Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code. In proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2007). April 2007. [ PDF ] Awarded Best Paper
Patrick Reynolds, Charles Killian, Janet L. Wiener, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Mehul A. Shah, and Amin Vahdat. Pip: Detecting the Unexpected in Distributed Systems. In proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006). May 2006.
Dejan Kostic, Ryan Braud, Charles Killian, Erik Vandekieft, James W. Anderson, Alex C. Snoeren, and Amin Vahdat. Maintaining High-bandwidth under Dynamic Network Conditions. In proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX 2005). April 2005. [ PDF ]
Charles Killian, Frank Ruskey, Carla Savage, and Mark Weston. Half-Simple Symmetric Venn Diagrams. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. 2004. [ PS PDF ]
Adolfo Rodriguez, Charles Killian, Sooraj Bhat, Dejan Kostic, and Amin Vahdat. MACEDON: Methodology for Automatically Creating, Evaluating, and Designing Overlay Networks. In proceedings of USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2004). March 2004. [ PS (Talk slides available upon request) ]
Jerry Griggs, Charles Killian, and Carla Savage. Venn diagrams and symmetric chain decompositions in the Boolean Lattice. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. Volume 11, January 2, 2004. [ PS PDF ] (An article about this result appeared in Science, Vol. 299, January 31, 2003 and it was the subject of a front page article in the January 2004 issue of SIAM News. Additionally, this work was featured in the December 2006 issue of the Notices of the AMS.)
Charles E. Killian, and Carla D. Savage. Antipodal Gray Codes. Discrete Math. Vol. 281, Nos. 1-3 (2004) 221-236. [Preprint: PDF PS ]
Feiyi Wang, Raghu Uppalli, and Charles Killian. Analysis of Techniques For Building Intrusion Tolerant Server Systems. In proceedings of Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2003). Oct 13-16, 2003.
Feiyi Wang, and Charles Killian. Design and Implementation of SITAR Architecture: A Status Report. In proceedings of Intrusion Tolerant System Workshop, Supplemental Volume on 2002 International Conference on Dependable System & Networks (DSN 2002). Washington D.C.. June 22-26, 2002. (unrefereed)
Posters
Karthik Nagaraj, Charles Killian, and Jennifer Neville. Tracking Behavioral Changes in Distributed Systems using Distalyzer. Poster at 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP 2011). Cascais, Portugal. In addition to being refereed, SOSP 2011 posters are shepherded and a 2-page abstract published on the SOSP website. 23-26 October, 2011.
Karthik Nagaraj, Hitesh Khandelwal, Ramana Kompella, and Charles Killian. DC2: Scalable Distributed Communication Middleware for the Cloud. Poster at 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2010). San Jose, CA. 28-30 April, 2010.
Karthik Nagaraj, Ramana Kompella, and Charles Killian. Distributed Social Networking. Poster at 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2009). Boston, MA. 22-24 April, 2009.
Charles Killian, James W. Anderson, Alex Rasmussen, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat. ONet: Persistent In-Network Data Structures. Poster at 21st ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP 2007). Stevenson, WA. 14-17 October, 2007.
Charles Killian, James W. Anderson, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat. MaceMC: Checking for Liveness Bugs in Distributed Systems. Poster at 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2006). Seattle, WA. 7 November, 2006. [PDF]
Adolfo Rodriguez, Charles Killian, Dejan Kostic, and Amin Vahdat. MACEDON: Methodology for Automatically Creating, Evaluating, and Designing Overlay Networks. Poster at 19th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP 2003). Lake George, NY. October, 2003. [PDF]
Feiyi Wang, Kishor Trivedi, Stephanie Bryant, Yun Cui, Katerina Goseva-Popstojanova, Charles Killian, Bharat Madan, Rajiv Poonamalli, Raghu Uppalli, Kalyan Vaidyanathan, Dazhi Wang, and Rong Wang. SITAR Final Demo: Scalable Intrusion Tolerant Architecture. Poster at 3rd Annual DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition (DISCEX III). Washington, D.C.. Poster and Demonstration. April 22-24, 2003.
Feiyi Wang, Kishor Trivedi, Stephanie Bryant, Katerina Goseva-Popstojanova, Charles Killian, Bharat Madan, Rajiv Poonamalli, Raghu Uppalli, Kalyan Vaidyanathan, and Rong Wang. SITAR Demo: Scalable Intrusion Tolerant Architecture. Poster at OASIS winter 2002 PI meeting. Hilton Head, SC. Poster and Demonstration. March 2002.
Invited Articles
Charles Killian, James W. Anderson, Ryan Braud, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat. Building Distributed Systems Using Mace. In proceedings of IEEE Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P 2009). September 2009. Demo and Extended Abstract (pages 91-92)
Jeannie Albrecht, Ryan Braud, Charles Killian, Priya Mahadevan, Kashi Vishwanath, and Amin Vahdat. An Integrated Development Environment for Distributed Systems. SPIE Newsroom, 33(1). March, 2008.
Advising
Since Spring 2009
Karthik Swaminathan Nagaraj, PhD student, post Prelim
Debugging distributed systems by data mining logs
Since Fall 2009
Sunghwan Yoo, PhD student, post Prelim
Advanced event processing - parallel and durable events
Since Spring 2010
Hyojeong Lee, PhD student, post Qual II
Automated discovery of malicious node behaviors
Since Spring 2011
Wei-Chiu Chuang, PhD student, post Qual II
Elastic distributed systems - language and runtime for scaling applications
Since Fall 2011
Bo Sang, PhD student, pre Qual II
Elastic distributed systems - language and runtime for scaling applications
Graduated Students
2009 - 2010
Anurag Singh, MS Degree
Software engineering enhanced model checking. Degree awarded May 2010. Went on to work for Qualcomm.
Awards received
  • 2011 HP Open Innovation Grant
  • Invited to submit to Cluster Computing Special Issue of the best papers from HPDC 2011
  • 2011 NSF CAREER Award
  • 2011 Purdue Research Foundation student support award 2011
  • Departmental Nomination for the MSR Faculty Fellowship 2009-2010
  • Dissertation of the Year Award for UCSD Computer Science 2007-2008
  • Best Paper Award for MaceMC paper at NSDI 2007
  • NCSU-PAMS College Graduating Senior Award for Research Excellence, Spring 2002
  • Honorable Mention for the NSF Graduate Fellowship
  • James B. Duke Graduate Fellowship
  • COE Dean's Fellowship at NCSU
  • Nominated for the College of Engineering Senior Award of Scholarly Achievement
  • Phi Beta Kappa (liberal arts society) Phi Kappa Phi (general honors society) Upsilon Pi Epsilon (computer science honors society) Pi Mu Epsilon (math honors society) Phi Eta Sigma (freshman honors society)
  • Honors Student of Computer Science and Math Departments
  • AT&T Solutions Scholarship
  • Howard A. Petrea Scholarship
Professional Activities