← Life Changelog

2023

Distributed Systems Research at BU

ResearchCompleted

BU Master's thesis: dynamic checkpointing for Apache Flink. Static checkpoint intervals are a tax in idle periods and a stall during bursts; I built a controller that adapted cadence from live backpressure signals.

● What I shipped

  • Instrumented Flink JobManager to surface per-operator backpressure ratios as a control signal.
  • Adaptive checkpoint cadence: shorten when load is low, lengthen under sustained backpressure to avoid amplifying stalls.
  • RocksDB state backend benchmarked against in-memory; quantified write-amplification tradeoffs.
  • Validated on the NEXMARK streaming benchmark — measured tail-latency wins on bursty workloads.

● Stack

JavaApache FlinkRocksDBNEXMARKJVM