Bernard Wong

Associate Professor

Davis Center Room 3514
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. West
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada

E-mail: bernard AT uwaterloo DOT ca
Phone: (519) 888-4567 x31301

 

My research interests span distributed systems and networking, with particular emphasis on problems involving decentralized services, self-organizing networks, and distributed storage systems.

Prospective students: I am currently seeking motivated graduate students who enjoy building large systems. More information about the School's graduate program requirements can be found here.

Teaching

Spring 2023	CS 854 Consensus Protocols and Blockchains
Spring 2022	CS 854 Cloud and Serverless Computing
Fall 2020	CS 456 Computer Networks
Fall 2018	CS 350 Operating Systems
Fall 2017	CS 350 Operating Systems
Winter 2017	CS 350 Operating Systems
Fall 2016	CS 854 Consensus Protocols
Winter 2016	CS 350 Operating Systems
Fall 2015	CS 350 Operating Systems
Winter 2015	CS 854 Cloud Computing and Software-Defined Networking
Fall 2014	CS 350 Operating Systems
Spring 2014	CS 854 Cloud Computing and Software-Defined Networking
Fall and Winter 2013	CS 343 Concurrent and Parallel Programming
Fall 2012	CS 854 Cloud Computing & Management This is a graduate course on current research topics in cloud computing and management. It is offered as a "paper-chase" course: we read and discuss important papers on different subtopics in cloud computing and management each week. Students must also individually complete a final project that explores a new idea in one of the sub-topics covered in the course. The goal is that by the end of the course, the final project can serve as a starting point for a workshop paper submission.
Winter 2012	CS 454/654 Distributed Systems

Project Webpages

CrossStitch	An Efficient Transaction Processing Framework for Geo-Distributed Systems.
EdgeCloud	A Hybrid Edge-Cloud Architecture for Reducing On-Demand Gaming Latency.
Nessie	A Client-Driven, RDMA-Enabled Storage System.
Microfuge	Performance Isolation in Cloud-based Storage Systems.
HyperDex	A Distributed, Searchable Key-Value Store for Cloud Computing.
Cubit	Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays.
Octant	A Comprehensive Framework for Geolocalization on the Internet.
Meridian	A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning.

Publications

• Toward Reducing Cross-Shard Transaction Overhead in Sharded Blockchains.
  Liuyang Ren, Paul A. S. Ward, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS),
  Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2022.
  Best Student Paper Award.
  Link to PDF
• Natto: Providing Distributed Transaction Prioritization for High-Contention Workloads.
  Linguan Yang, Xinan Yan, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data,
  Philadelphia, PA, June 2022.
  PDF
• Antipaxos: Taking Interactive Consistency to the Next Level.
  Chunyu Mao, Wojciech M. Golab, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN),
  Delhi, India, January 2022.
  Link to PDF
• Improving the Performance of Blockchain Sharding Protocols with Collaborative Transaction Verification.
  Liuyang Ren, Paul A. S. Ward, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the IEEE Internationl Conference on Blockchain,
  Melbourne, Australia, December 2021.
  Link to PDF
• Domino: Using Network Measurements to Reduce State Machine Replication Latency in WANs.
  Xinan Yan, Linguan Yang, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT),
  Barcelona, Spain, December 2020.
  PDF
• Fault Tolerant Service Function Chaining.
  Milad Ghaznavi, Elaheh Jalalpour, Bernard Wong, Raouf Boutaba, and Ali José Mashtizadeh.
  In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference,
  New York, NY, August 2020.
  PDF
• Sift: Resource-Efficient Consensus with RDMA.
  Mikhail Kazhamiaka, Babar Memon, Chathura Kankanamge, Siddhartha Sahu, Sajjad Rizvi, Bernard Wong, and Khuzaima Daudjee.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT),
  Orlando, FL, December 2019.
  PDF
• SpecRPC: A General Framework for Performing Speculative Remote Procedure Calls.
  Xinan Yan, Arturo Pie Joa, Bernard Wong, Benjamin Cassell, Tyler Szepesi, Malek Naouach, and Disney Lam.
  In Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware),
  Rennes, France, December 2018.
  PDF
• RaMP: A Lightweight RDMA Abstraction for Loosely Coupled Applications.
  Babar Naveed Memon, Xiayue Charles Lin, Arshia Mufti, Arthur Scott Wesley, Tim Brecht, Kenneth Salem, Bernard Wong, and Benjamin Cassell.
  In Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud),
  Boston, MA, July 2018.
  PDF
• Carousel: Low-Latency Transaction Processing for Globally-Distributed Data.
  Xinan Yan, Linguan Yang, Hongbo Zhang, Xiayue Charles Lin, Bernard Wong, Kenneth Salem, and Tim Brecht.
  In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data,
  Houston, TX, June 2018.
  PDF (Updated 6/2021)
• Disk Prefetching Mechanisms for Increasing HTTP Streaming Video Server Throughput.
  Benjamin Cassell, Tyler Szepesi, Jim Summers, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, and Bernard Wong.
  In ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems (TOMPECS).
  Volume 3, Issue 2, April 2018.
  PDF
• NetStore: Leveraging Network Optimizations to Improve Distributed Transaction Processing Performance.
  Xu Cui, Michael Mior, Bernard Wong, Khuzaima Daudjee, and Sajjad Rizvi.
  In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Active Middleware on Modern Hardware,
  Las Vegas, NV, December 2017.
  PDF
• Canopus: A Scalable and Massively Parallel Consensus Protocol.
  Sajjad Rizvi, Bernard Wong, and Srinivasan Keshav.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT),
  Seoul/Incheon, South Korea, December 2017.
  Best Paper Award Nominee.
  PDF/ Extended Technical Report/ Presentation
• Nessie: A Decoupled, Client-Driven Key-Value Store Using RDMA.
  Benjamin Cassell, Tyler Szepesi, Bernard Wong, Tim Brecht, Jonathan Ma, and Xiaoyi Liu.
  In IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS),
  Volume 28, Issue 12, December 2017,
  doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2729545.
  PDF
• Using Libception to Understand and Improve HTTP Streaming Video Server Throughput.
  Tyler Szepesi, Ben Cassell, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, Jim Summers, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE),
  L'Aquila, Italy, April 2017.
  PDF
• R3S: RDMA-based RDD Remote Storage for Spark.
  Xinan Yan, Bernard Wong, and Sharon Choy.
  In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM),
  Trento, Italy, December 2016.
  PDF
• Mayflower: Improving Distributed Filesystem Performance Through SDN/Filesystem Co-Design.
  Sajjad Rizvi, Xi Li, Bernard Wong, Fiodar Kazhamiaka, and Benjamin Cassell.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS),
  Nara, Japan, June 2016.
  PDF
• Understanding the Causes of Consistency Anomalies in Apache Cassandra.
  Hua Fan, Aditya Ramaraju, Marlon McKenzie, Wojciech Golab, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB),
  Kohala Coast, Hawaii, August 2015.
  PDF
• Towards Reconfigurable Rack-Scale Networking.
  Tyler Szepesi, Bernard Wong, Tim Brecht, and Sajjad Rizvi.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Rack-scale Computing (WRSC),
  Bordeaux, France, April 2015.
  PDF
• PRISM: Fine-Grained Resource-Aware Scheduling for MapReduce.
  Qi Zhang, Mohamed Faten Zhani, Yuke Yang, Raouf Boutaba, and Bernard Wong.
  In IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC),
  Volume 3, Issue 2, January 2015.
  Link to PDF
• Latency Amplification: Characterizing the Impact of Web Page Content on Load Times.
  Catalin Avram, Kenneth Salem, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Planetary-Scale Distributed Systems (W-PSDS),
  Nara, Japan, October 2014.
  
• Quartz: A New Design Element for Low-Latency DCNs.
  Yunpeng James Liu, Peter Xiang Gao, Bernard Wong, and Srinivasan Keshav.
  In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference,
  Chicago, Illinois, August 2014.
  PDF
• Automated Control of Aggressive Prefetching for HTTP Streaming Video Servers.
  Jim Summers, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, Tyler Szepesi, Ben Cassell, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR),
  Haifa, Israel, June 2014.
  PDF
• MicroFuge: A Middleware Approach to Providing Performance Isolation in Cloud Storage Systems.
  Akshay K. Singh, Xu Cui, Benjamin Cassell, Bernard Wong, and Khuzaima Daudjee.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS),
  Madrid, Spain, June 2014.
  PDF
• Designing A Low-Latency Cuckoo Hash Table for Write-Intensive Workloads Using RDMA.
  Tyler Szepesi, Bernard Wong, Benjamin Cassell, and Tim Brecht.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Rack-scale Computing (WRSC),
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 2014.
  PDF
• Kronos: The Design and Implementation of an Event Ordering Service.
  Robert Escriva, Ayush Dubey, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys),
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 2014.
  PDF
• A Hybrid Edge-Cloud Architecture for Reducing On-Demand Gaming Latency.
  Sharon Choy, Bernard Wong, Gwendal Simon, and Catherine Rosenberg.
  In Springer's Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ) Special Issue on Network and Systems Support for Games, 2014,
  doi:10.1007/s00530-014-0367-z.
  Link to PDF
• Towards an Efficient Online Causal-Event-Pattern-Matching Framework.
  Sukanta Pramanik, David Taylor, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS),
  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 2013.
  PDF
• MemRed: Towards Reliable Web Applications.
  Masoomeh Rudafshani, Paul Ward, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure and Dependable Middleware for Cloud Monitoring and Management (SDMCMM),
  Montreal, Canada, December 2012.
  PDF
• The Brewing Storm in Cloud Gaming: A Measurement Study on Cloud to End-User Latency.
  Sharon Choy, Bernard Wong, Gwendal Simon, and Catherine Rosenberg.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames),
  Venice, Italy, November 2012.
  PDF
• HyperDex: A Distributed, Searchable Key-Value Store.
  Robert Escriva, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference,
  Helsinki, Finland, August 2012.
  PDF
• It's Not Easy Being Green.
  Peter Xiang Gao, Andrew R. Curtis, Bernard Wong, and Srinivasan Keshav.
  In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference,
  Helsinki, Finland, August 2012.
  PDF
• An Introduction to HyperDex and the Brave New World of High Performance, Scalable, Consistent, Fault-tolerant Data Stores.
  Robert Escriva, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In USENIX ;login: Volume 37, Number 3, June 2012.
  
• To Chunk or Not to Chunk: Implications for HTTP Streaming Video Server Performance.
  Jim Summers, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV),
  Toronto, Canada, June 2012.
  PDF
• Methodologies for Generating HTTP Streaming Video Workloads to Evaluate Web Server Performance.
  Jim Summers, Tim Brecht, Derek Eager, and Bernard Wong.
  In Proceedings of the International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR), Haifa, Israel, June 2012.
  PDF
• Small-World Datacenters.
  Ji-Yong Shin, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC),
  Cascais, Portugal, October 2011.
  PDF
• A Content Propagation Metric for Efficient Content Distribution.
  Ryan S. Peterson, Bernard Wong, and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference
  Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 2011.
  PDF
• Dude where's that IP? Circumventing Measurement-based IP Geolocation.
  Phillipa Gill, Yashar Ganjali, Bernard Wong, and David Lie.
  In Proceedings of Usenix Security Symposium,
  Washington, DC, August 2010.
  PDF
• Blindfold: A System to "See No Evil" in Content Discovery.
  Ryan S. Peterson, Bernard Wong, Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS),
  San Jose, California, April 2010.
  PDF
• Quasar: A Probabilistic Publish-Subscribe System for Social Networks.
  Bernard Wong and Saikat Guha.
  In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS),
  Tampa Bay, Florida, Feb 2008.
  PDF
• Hyperspaces for Object Clustering and Approximate Matching in Peer-to-Peer Overlays.
  Bernard Wong, Ýmir Vigfússon and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS),
  San Diego, California, May 2007.
  PDF
• Octant: A Comprehensive Framework for the Geolocalization of Internet Hosts.
  Bernard Wong, Ivan Stoyanov and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI),
  Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2007.
  PDF
• Geolocalization on the Internet through Constraint Satisfaction.
  Bernard Wong, Ivan Stoyanov and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems (WORLDS),
  Seattle, Washington, November 2006.
  PDF
• ClosestNode.com: An Open-Access, Scalable, Shared Geocast Service for Distributed Systems.
  Bernard Wong and Emin Gün Sirer.
  In SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 40, Number 1, January 2006.
  PDF
• Meridian: A Lightweight Network Location Service without Virtual Coordinates.
  Bernard Wong, Aleksandrs Slivkins, Emin Gün Sirer.
  In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference,
  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 2005.
  PDF
• Dynamically Loaded Classes as Shared Libraries: an Approach to Improving Virtual Machine Scalability.
  Bernard Wong, Grzegorz Czajkowski and Laurent Daynès.
  In Proceedings of International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS),
  Nice, France, April 2003.
  PDF

Technical Reports

• Constellation: A High Performance Geo-Distributed Middlebox Framework.
  Milad Ghaznavi, Ali José Mashtizadeh, Bernard Wong, and Raouf Boutaba.
  arXiv:2003.05111, March 2020.
  PDF
• CrossStitch: An Efficient Transaction Processing Framework for Geo-Distributed Systems.
  Sharon Choy, Bernard Wong, Xu Cui, and Xiaoyi Liu.
  University of Waterloo, School of Computer Sciecne Technical Report CS-2015-08, June 2015.
  PDF
• Nessie: A Decoupled, Client-Driven, Key-Value Store using RDMA.
  Tyler Szepesi, Benjamin Cassell, Bernard Wong, Tim Brecht, and Xiaoyi Liu.
  University of Waterloo, School of Computer Sciecne Technical Report CS-2015-09, June 2015.
  PDF
• Lanternfish: Better Random Networks Through Optics.
  Tyler Szepesi, Bernard Wong, Fiodar Kazhami, Sajjad Rizvi, and Tim Brecht.
  University of Waterloo, School of Computer Sciecne Technical Report CS-2015-11, June 2015.
  PDF
• Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays with Cubit
  Bernard Wong, Aleksandrs Slivkins and Emin Gün Sirer.
  Cornell University, Computing and Information Science Technical Report http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11651, December 2008
  PDF
• Meridian: A Lightweight Network Location Service without Virtual Coordinates (Extended Technical Report).
  Bernard Wong, Aleksandrs Slivkins and Emin Gün Sirer.
  Cornell University, Computing and Information Science Technical Report TR2005-1982, February 2005.
  PDF
• A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning.
  Bernard Wong and Emin Gün Sirer.
  Cornell University, Computing and Information Science Technical Report TR2004-1949, August 2004.
  PDF

Patents

• System and Methods for Mapping and Searching Objects in Multidimensional Space.
  Emin Gün Sirer, Nicole L. Caruso and Bernard Wong.
  US Patent Number 9317536, April 2016.
• Geographically Localizing Mobile Communication Devices.
  Bernard Wong, Samir Goel and Ravi Jain.
  US Patent Number 7983691, July 2011.

Professional Activities (out of date)

• PC member ICPADS 2014
• PC member W-PSDS 2014
• PC member P2P 2014
• PC member ICCCN 2014
• PC member WRSC 2014
• PC member EuroSys 2014
• PC member P2P 2013
• PC member USENIX ATC 2013
• PC member HotDep 2012
• PC member P2P 2012
• PC member ROADS 2009
• PC member ICCCN 2009 P2PN