Alex Rasmussen www.alexras.info

About Me

I'm a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science working in the Systems and Networking Group at UC San Diego under the supervision of Dr. Amin Vahdat. I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California Berkeley in 2007.

My resume contains more detailed information about my educational and employment history.

Research

My research interests span several systems disciplines. Mainly, I'm interested in making distributed systems easier to build without compromising their performance.

Current Projects

Mace (website)

The goal of Mace is to simplify the development, research and deployment of distributed systems. It consists of an extensible set of APIs geared at modularizing and componentizing parts of distributed systems, a domain-specific C++ language extension describing a system's behavior from which real operating code can be generated, a software engine implementing common distributed system features and functionality, and a model checker capable of finding violations of liveness properties which lead the system to dead states. Mace allows algorithm designers to focus their attention on the algorithm itself and less on tedious implementation details. In the process, we promote code re-usability and fair comparisons of competing algorithms.

MapStore

MapStore is a strongly-consistent distributed storage layer designed to run on a network of data centers. More details soon.

Past Projects

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I played a small role in the P2 declarative networking project. I also worked on UC Berkeley's undergraduate parallelism initiative; the results of that initiative will soon be available on Google Code for Educators

Publications

Surfacing the Deep Web. Jayant Madhavan, David Ko, Lucja Kot, Vignesh Ganapathy, Alex Rasmussen, Alon Halevy. To appear in 34th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2008). Auckland, New Zealand. 24-30 August 2008.

Infusing Parallelism into Introductory Computer Science Curriculum using MapReduce. Matthew Johnson, Robert H. Liao, Alexander Rasmussen, Ramesh Sridharan, Dan Garcia and Brian K. Harvey. UC Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2008-34.

Posters and Talks

Matthew Johnson, Robert H. Liao, Alex Rasmussen, Ramesh Sridharan, Brian Harvey and Daniel D. Garcia. Infusing Parallelism into Introductory Computer Science Curriculum using MapReduce. Poster. Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SigCSE 2008). Portland, OR. 15 March 2008.

Contact

Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0404
La Jolla, Ca 92093-0404

Office: 3146 CSE

E-mail: