ATLANTA (July 20, 2006)--The College's Computing Science & Systems (CSS) division has four papers accepted to the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 7th International Middleware Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The broad scope of this premier conference is the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of distributed systems platforms, and architectures for future computing environments. Because only 21 total papers were accepted by the 2006 conference, this is quite an achievement for CSS.

The four CSS accepted papers demonstrate the strong research in middleware systems being conducted at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Middleware is used in a wide variety of enterprise information systems, and solving the challenges in deploying efficient, robust middleware is key to the development of next generation enterprise systems. Three out of the four papers had industrial co-authors, showing how CSS researchers are actively working to solve real problems faced by enterprises. Congratulations to the following CSS faculty and students: Professor Karsten Schwan, Associate Professor Ling Liu, Assistant Professor Brian Cooper, Research Scientist Greg Eisenhauer, and Ph.D. students Zhontang Cai, Vibhore Kumar, Seung Jun, and Mudhakar Srivatsa.

Title: A Middleware System for Protecting Against Application Level Denial of Service Attacks
Authors: Mudhakar Srivatsa (Georgia Tech), Arun Iyengar (IBM TJ Watson),Jian Yin (IBM TJ Watson) and Ling Liu (Georgia Tech)
Summary: Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are one of the primary threats facing online services. This work presents a novel solution to an increasingly frequent attack: application-level DoS attacks. By monitoring and controlling the amount of resources used in servicing requests, the middleware can protect against a wide range of DoS attacks (including previously unseen attacks) while remaining transparent to the client.

Title: Utility-Driven Proactive Management of Availability in Enterprise-Scale Information Flows
Authors: Zhongtang Cai (Georgia Tech), Vibhore Kumar (Georgia Tech), Brian F. Cooper (Georgia Tech), Greg Eisenhauer (Georgia Tech), Karsten Schwan (Georgia Tech) and Robert E. Strom (IBM TJ Watson)
Summary: Information flows underpin many vital computing systems used by enterprises to manage their day-to-day operations. These information flows must be made resilient to failures, but at an affordable cost. This work examines how to ensure high availability of critical information flows, while allowing the enterprise to tune the tradeoff between overhead during normal operation and cost of recovery according to their business needs.

Title: Low-Overhead Message Tracking for Distributed Messaging
Authors: Seung Jun (Georgia Tech) and Mark Astley (IBM TJ Watson)
Summary: Messaging middleware is both critical and extremely complex to deploy and maintain. Efficient message tracking has become instrumental in testing and run-time monitoring, as enterprise applications rely increasingly on commodity messaging middleware. The paper presents a message tracking system, using Bloom filters, that achieves low overhead with respect to latency, memory, and storage.

Title: Trading Off Resources Between Overlapping Overlays
Author: Brian F. Cooper (Georgia Tech)
Summary: Enterprises who want to get the most of their infrastructure investment often use the same hardware to support multiple services. However, safeguards are needed to ensure that one service does not steal all of the infrastructure resources, especially if other services are higher priority. This work examines how overlapping distributed information services (often implemented using network overlays) can be made to play nicely with each other and respect the business's objectives and priorities.

For more information about the 2006 Middleware Conference, click here.