Philippe Bonnet

Research overview

Flash Devices Performance (uFlip)

Flash technology has great potential, promising increased throughput with reduced energy consumption. While flash chip behavior is very precisely specified, commercially available flash devices are not. Our goal is to understand the performance characteristics of these devices in order to a) compare the performance of competing devices, b) understand which class of flash devices best matches a given usage pattern, and c) influence the design of future devices.

Sensornet-Based Ecosystem Instrumentation (INTERACT, MANA)

Ecologists instrument ecosystems with in-situ sensing to collect measurements. Sensor networks promise to improve on existing data acquisition systems by allowing instrumentation in new places, and by interconnecting existing stand-alone measurement systems into virtual instruments networked and controlled for higher utility and dependability. A key challenge is to design autonomous systems that control the sensor network to meet the scientists requirements in a dynamic environment.

Database Tuning (.org)

Database Tuning is the activity of making database application run faster. Twenty years ago, Dennis Shasha abstracted a set of principles from his experience tuning database systems. Ten years ago, Dennis and I devised a set of experiments to quantify the performance impact of these principles. Today, the focus on energy efficiency, the advent of new hardware and the evolution of database systems introduce new trade-offs.

Computational Repeatability

The experimental results published in a research paper should be repeatable. In traditional fields, data acquisition is based on long term data acquisition efforts. In the context of some computational experiments, data acquisition is in fact repeatable. The data derivation phases should always be repeatable. I am looking into two sides of this problem. The first focuses on how to ensure repeatability. This work was started by D.Shasha in the context of the SIGMOD conference in 2008. I was repeatability chair in 2011. The second focuses on defining an infrastructure for executable papers, where the derivation phases can be re-executed and possibly modified or integrated in other workflows. This is joint work with J.Freire and D.Shasha from NYU.

Sensor Network Engineering

When I joined Cornell, ten years ago, I had the privilege to be involved in the first DARPA program focusing on software development for sensor networks (SensIT). I have since been been interested in identifying and tackling the issues that block the adoption of sensor networks in the context of industrial and scientific applications. The challenge is to organize the complexity of sensor network systems and to define a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to their design and operation.