Applied Distributed Systems Lab (ADSLab)

The Applied Distributed Systems Lab (ADSLab) is a systems research group led by Prof. Patrick P. C. Lee from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We conduct applied research on large-scale computing systems, including file and storage systems, distributed systems, computer networks, cloud computing, etc. Our research puts specific emphasis on practical system design, prototype implementation, and in-depth experiments under realistic deployment environments. We ensure that our developed systems achieve the guarantees of performance, scalability, dependability, and generality, as well as provide a deploying environment for running large-scale data analytics applications.

ADSLab aims for the long-term goals:

• Define new system design invariants that provide insights for academia and industry into solving practical problems;
• Complement and validate the practical implications of the fundamental results explored by theoretical research;
• Collaborate with industry and carry out technology/knowledge transfers of our system prototypes; and
• Train students to be solid systems researchers who can contribute to both academia and industry.

Our current research focus is on building dependable storage systems, with emphasis on fault tolerance, recovery, security, and performance. We explore practical mechanisms that address the dependability issues of different types of storage architectures including clouds, data centers, disk arrays, SSDs, and memory. We also study topics in stream processing and network measurement, with specific emphasis on solving dependability issues.