"Overhaul"

This is the main project page for ACM SIGSoft's Overhaul project, an implementation of a research project in the UIUC Department of Computer Science. A description of the project, our group, and the policies surrounding are included below. In addition, we have taken notes at our meetings and formal development sessions. These should provide some insight to our development process.

Project Description

For this project, we are working with Professor Indranil Gupta and graduate student Jay Patel to extend their research in the form of a project. Our current plan is to write a Mozilla extension for the Firefox web browser, turning it into an overhaul-compliant browser. With such an extension, Firefox would be able to take advantage of the flash crowd-fighting abilities of Overhaul, and the Overhaul project will hopefully gain recognition as a realistic and deployable solution.

In brief, a flash crowd is a sudden and vast increase in traffic to a site (usually caused by a link from a popular news feed, a.k.a. the Slashdot Effect) that threatens to overwhelm a server. Present solutions include shutting the site down or modifying the content. Overhaul seeks to alleviate demand on the server by distributing the documents in smaller "chunks" that are assembled by the clients on a peer-to-peer network. You may see the related publications for details.

Related Research

We provide for reference the research we have done to the end of this project. We make no claims of authorship or expertise on any of these documents, but merely provide them as a resource to others with similar interests. They are provided in their entirety and without any modification by us.

Here are some links to useful resources:

Source Code

Source code is available for viewing at the inline Repository Explorer. You may also get your own working copy anonymously. It is our fond hope that the code we produce will serve as a functional and educational resource for other students and hobbyists in Computer Science. Suggestions and modifications are most appreciated, and will be remarked on this website. Contact the SIGSoft Chairs if you would like to help.

About SIGSoft

SIGSoft is the Special Interest Group for Software Engineering, a student chapter, part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). We make our home in the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science at the University of Illinois engineering campus. The same building is home to the UIUC Computer Science Department, part of the College of Engineering. We are currently composed of fifteen undergraduate students, most majoring in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

Contributing Members