Raja R. Sambasivan

Computer Science Department, Tufts University.

raja_cropped.jpg

Joyce Cummings Center 453

177 College Ave

Medford, MA 02155

I am the Ankur & Mari Sahu Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. I mentor an incredible group of students at the D.O.C.C. Lab. We generally focus on systems. Recently, we have been especially interested in observability techniques for cloud-based distributed systems.

From November of 2016 to July of 2019, I was a Red Hat Visiting Research Scientist at Boston University. I worked on the Mass Open Cloud project with Orran Krieger, focusing on architectures for building vendor-neutral clouds and creating problem diagnosis tools for them. From May of 2013 to October of 2016, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). I worked on the XIA project with Peter Steenkiste, focusing on evolvability for inter-domain routing protocols. Our SIGCOMM paper showed that two simple mechanisms implemented within existing routing protocols would allow them to facilitate incremental deployment of future inter-domain routing protocols. These features would provide incentives for both early adopters of new protocols as well as avoid disincentives for parties uninterested in them.

I completed my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in May 2013 and was advised by Greg Ganger. My dissertation, “Diagnosing performance changes in distributed systems by comparing request flows”, focused on creating methods to diagnose performance problems in the distributed systems society relies on for their everyday tasks. Today, these methods are commonly used in industry under the moniker “distributed tracing.” The resulting papers (HotAC, NSDI, InfoVis, SoCC) influenced these industrial efforts.

In my spare time, I enjoy playing tennis, taking long walks, and exploring New England. I am “famous” for appearing in a PhDComics strip. In the strip, I ask CS PhD students to wear lab coats to work so that folks will know that we are researchers too :blush:. Don’t forget to pop on a pair of lab goggles when debugging!

research opportunities

Prospective PhDs: I recruit one to two PhD students per year to work on projects broadly related to systems and networking. I look for students who are curious, have strong technical skills, communicate well, and like exploring (slightly) crazy ideas. If you are interested, please apply to Tufts CS and send me an email. The application deadline is usually September 15th for Spring admission and December 15th for Fall admission.

Tufts undergrads & Master’s students: My lab hosts a few undergrads & Master’s students every year. If you are interested, send me an email. It helps if you have already taken or are planning to take Cloud Computing (CS 118), Networking (CS 112), or Operating Systems (CS 111).

scheduling meetings

Separately from class office hours, I am available for 15-minute meetings with Tufts undergrads and Master’s students between 5 pm and 6 pm on Fridays. You may book meeting slot up to two weeks in advance. Please use this link to schedule a meeting.

news

Dec 23, 2024 I’m serving on the NSDI’26 Program Committee
Mar 03, 2024 Received a NSF CAREER Award! Thank you to the NSF for this gracious award and to my students for making this award possible with their hard work.
Feb 16, 2024 I will be serving on the PC for NSDI’25
Jan 22, 2024 Darby and Max’s paper on “Systemizing and mitigating topological inconsistencies in Alibaba’s microservice call-graph data” was accepted to ICPE’24!
May 20, 2023 Sarah Abowitz will be spending the summer interning at Dynatrace working on observability and privacy. Congrats Sarah!

selected publications

  1. ICPE
    Systemizing and mitigating topological inconsistencies in Alibaba’s microservice call-graph datasets
    Darby Huye , Lan Liu , and Raja R. Sambasivan
    In ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering , May 2024
  2. ATC
    Lifting the veil on Meta’s microservice architecture: Analyses of topology and request workflows
    Darby Huye , Yuri Shkuro , and Raja R. Sambasivan
    In USENIX Annual Technical Conference , Jul 2023
  3. SoCC
    Automating instrumentation choices for performance problems in distributed applications with VAIF
    Mert Toslali , Emre Ates , Alex Ellis , and 6 more authors
    In ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing , Nov 2021
  4. SIGCOMM
    Bootstrapping evolvability for inter-domain routing with D-BGP
    Raja R. Sambasivan , David Tran-Lam , Aditya Akella , and 1 more author
    In ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) , Aug 2017
  5. SoCC
    Principled workflow-centric tracing of distributed systems
    Raja R. Sambasivan , Ilari Shafer , Jonathan Mace , and 3 more authors
    In ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing , Oct 2016
  6. NSDI
    Diagnosing performance changes by comparing request flows
    Raja R Sambasivan , Alice X Zheng , Michael De Rosa , and 6 more authors
    In USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) , Mar 2011