About

I am a Research Associate in the CS department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver (Canada). I am affiliated with the Systopia Lab at UBC, where I work with Margo Seltzer.

Earlier, I spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Saarbrücken (Germany), during which I worked with Jonathan Mace in the Cloud Software Systems Group. I completed my PhD thesis titled – Towards “Ultra-Reliable” CPS: Reliability Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems – under the supervision of Björn B. Brandenburg in the Real-Time Systems Group at MPI-SWS.

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, I was a software development engineer in the Cloud Networking Group at Citrix R&D, India. I finished my undergraduate studies in computer science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS Pilani), India.

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in real-time systems, distributed systems, fault tolerance, reliability analysis, and scheduling problems in the cloud domain as well as in the cyber-physical systems (CPS) domain.

For the cloud domain, I am currently working on building efficient systems for deep neural network inference serving along with Safya Alzayat, Antoine Kaufmann, and Jonathan Mace. Previously, I worked briefly on virtual machine scheduling for datacenter applications with Manohar Vanga. During my internship at Microsoft Research, I worked on the problem of distributed auto-scaling for Microsoft Azure’s inference serving platform, in collaboration with Kathryn S. McKinley, Sameh Elnikety, and Yuxiong He.

In the CPS domain, I have explored reliability and schedulability analysis problems along with my PhD advisor Björn B. Brandenburg. As part of my PhD thesis, I worked on quantitative reliability analysis of distributed real-time systems, such as networked control systems, in the presence of environmentally-induced transient faults. I have had the pleasure of working closely with Rupak Majumdar and Mitra Nasri on this project. Together with Felipe Cerqueira, I worked on formalizing the processor affinity concept from the perspective of hard real-time operating systems, and on providing schedulability guarantees for the same.

Publications

Conference Publications

Arpan Gujarati, Reza Karimi, Safya Alzayat, Wei Hao, Antoine Kaufmann, Ymir Vigfusson, and Jonathan Mace, “Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Up”, Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2020), November 2020. Distinguished Artifact Award | PDF | Slides | Video | Code

Arpan Gujarati, Sergey Bozhko, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Real-Time Replica Consistency over Ethernet with Reliability Bounds”, Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2020), April 2020. Distinguished Paper Award | PDF | Extended Version | Slides

Arpan Gujarati, Mitra Nasri, Rupak Majumdar, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “From Iteration to System Failure: Characterizing the FITness of Periodic Weakly-Hard Systems”, Proceedings of the 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019), July 2019. PDF | Extended Version | Slides

Arpan Gujarati, Mitra Nasri, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Quantifying the Resiliency of Fail-Operational Real-Time Networked Control Systems”, Proceedings of the 30th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2018), July 2018. Best Presentation Award | PDF | Extended Version | Slides | Poster

Manohar Vanga, Arpan Gujarati, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Tableau: A High-Throughput and Predictable VM Scheduler for High-Density Workloads”, Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2018), April 2018. PDF

Arpan Gujarati, Sameh Elnikety, Yuxiong He, Kathryn S. McKinley, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Swayam: Distributed Autoscaling to Meet SLAs of Machine Learning Inference Services with Resource Efficiency”, Proceedings of the 18th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2017), December 2017. Best Student Paper Award | Paper | Appendix | Slides

Arpan Gujarati, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “When is CAN the Weakest Link? A Bound on Failures-In-Time in CAN-Based Real-Time Systems”, Proceedings of the 36th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2015), pp. 249–260, December 2015. PDF | Slides | Poster

Felipe Cerqueira, Arpan Gujarati, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Linux’s Processor Affinity API, Refined: Shifting Real-Time Tasks towards Higher Schedulability”, Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2014), pp. 249-259, December 2014. PDF | Slides

Arpan Gujarati, Felipe Cerqueira, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Schedulability Analysis of the Linux Push and Pull Scheduler with Arbitrary Processor Affinities”, Proceedings of the 25th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2013), pp. 69-79, July 2013. Outstanding Paper Award | PDF | Slides | Poster

Journal Publications

Arpan Gujarati, Felipe Cerqueira, Björn B. Brandenburg, and Geoffrey Nelissen, “Correspondence article: a correction of the reduction-based schedulability analysis for APA scheduling”, Real-Time Systems, August 2018. PDF | Springer Link

Arpan Gujarati, Felipe Cerqueira, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Multiprocessor Real-Time Scheduling with Arbitrary Processor Affinities: From Practice to Theory”, Real-Time Systems, Volume 51, Issue 4, pp. 440–483. Springer Verlag, 2015. PDF | Springer Link

Workshop and Work-in-Progress Publications

Arpan Gujarati, Sathish Gopalakrishnan, and Karthik Pattabiraman, “New Wine in an Old Bottle: N-Version Programming for Machine Learning Components”, Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Workshop on Software Certification (WoSoCer 2020), October 2020. PDF | Slides

Arpan Gujarati, Malte Appel, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Work-in-Progress: Achal: Building Highly Reliable Networked Control Systems”, Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2019), October 2019. PDF | Slides | Poster

Mitra Nasri, Arpan Gujarati, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Using Schedule-Abstraction Graphs for the Analysis of CAN Message Response Times”, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Security and Dependability of Critical Embedded Real-Time Systems (CERTS 2018), June 2018. PDF | Slides

Arpan Gujarati, Mitra Nasri, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “Lower-Bounding the MTTF for Systems with (m, k) Constraints and IID Iteration Failure Probabilities”, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Security and Dependability of Critical Embedded Real-Time Systems (CERTS 2017), December 2017. PDF | Technical Report | Slides

Malte Appel, Arpan Gujarati, and Björn B. Brandenburg, “A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Key-Value Store for Safety-Critical Distributed Real-Time Systems”, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Security and Dependability of Critical Embedded Real-Time Systems (CERTS 2017), December 2017. PDF | Slides

Thesis

Arpan Gujarati, “Towards ‘Ultra-Reliable’ CPS: Reliability Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems”, under the supervision of Björn B. Brandenburg, MPI-SWS and TU Kaiserslautern, 2020. PDF | Slides | BibTex

Service and Teaching

Program committee member for conferences:

Program committee member for short papers and artifacts:

  • ECRTS Artifact Evaluation (2019)
  • RTEST Work-in-Progress (2018)
  • RTAS Brief Presentations (2019, 2020)
  • Middleware Doctoral Symposium (2020)

Journal reviewer:

  • JSys (2021)
  • TDSC (2019)
  • TECS (2019, 2020)

External reviewer for conferences:

  • ECRTS (2013-2015, 2019)
  • EMSOFT (2020)
  • EuroSys (2013, 2016, 2019)
  • Middleware (2018)
  • RTAS (2013, 2014, 2016)
  • RTNS (2014-2016)
  • RTSS (2013, 2016, 2018, 2020)
  • SYSTOR (2015, 2016)

Teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate courses:

  • Data Structures and Algorithms (BITS Pilani, 2010)
  • Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems (MPI-SWS & TU-Kaiserslautern, 2014)
  • Distributed Systems (MPI-SWS & Saarland University, 2016)
  • Operating Systems (MPI-SWS & Saarland University, 2017)

Contact

arpanbg [AT] cs [DOT] ubc [DOT] ca
arpanbg [AT] mpi [DOT] sws [DOT] org

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