Keynote Speakers

In the following you will find information about the keynote speakers of the Networking 2011 conference.

Jim Kurose

Title of the talk:

Cyber-physical systems: linking sensing, networking, computation, and people

Summary:

Cyber-physical systems integrate sensing, networking, and computation to observe, understand, predict and respond to phenomena in both technological and naturally-occurring systems.. We begin this talk with a broad discussion of such cyber-physical systems. As a case study, we then “dive deep” into the CASA (Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere) project - an NSF Engineering Research Center investigating the design and implementation of a dense network of low-power meteorological radars whose goal is to collaboratively and adaptively sense, understand, predict and respond to hazardous weather occurring in the lowest few kilometers of the earth's atmosphere. We overview the CASA project, describe its computing and networking challenges, and overview the software/network architecture and implementation of the CASA testbeds. We then focus on networking- and computing-related research issues and discuss our experiences in using user-specified preferences to drive the optimization of the network's sensing behavior. Throughout the talk, we’ll discussion of a number of interesting on-going and open research issues, both in CASA, and in the larger context of cyber-physical systems, including smart grids.

About the speaker:

Jim Kurose received a B.A. degree in physics from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Columbia University. He is currently Executive Associate Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Distinguished Professor (and past chairman) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. Professor Kurose has been a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research, INRIA, Institut EURECOM, the University of Paris, LIP6, and Thomson Research Labs.

His research interests include network protocols and architecture, network measurement, sensor networks, multimedia communication, and modeling and performance evaluation. Dr. Kurose has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has been active in the program committees for IEEE Infocom, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM SIGMETRICS conferences for a number of years, and has served as Technical Program Co-Chair for these conferences. He has won several conference best paper awards and received the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Award. He has also received a number of teaching awards including the IEEE Taylor Booth Education Medal. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. With Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the textbook, Computer Networking, a top down approach (5th edition) published by Addison-Wesley Longman.

José Duato

Title of the talk

Toward more energy efficient and cost effective Internet services.

Summary

The ever increasing demand of Internet services is leading to the deployment of increasingly larger servers. These servers not only imply large infrastructure costs but also the consumption of an increasing percentage of the electricity produced in power plants, that is already approaching a 2%. To address these concerns, computer and networking equipment manufacturers are developing new components that deliver more performance with a reduced power budget. Processors were the first components to incorporate power management techniques but other components will follow. Moreover, a whole set of techniques to increase energy efficiency and cost effectiveness are being deployed or are currently under development. Those techniques include interconnect consolidation, virtualization, scalable shared-memory architectures, the use of low-cost accelerators, and the design of interconnects tailored to the real needs, among others. This keynote addresses these concerns, presents quantitative data, and describes some of the solutions that are being developed.

About the speaker:

Jose Duato received the MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, in 1981 and 1985, respectively. Currently, Dr. Duato is Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering (DISCA) at the same university. He was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University.

His current research interests include interconnection networks and multiprocessor architectures. Prof. Duato has published over 400 refereed papers. He proposed a powerful theory of deadlock-free adaptive routing for wormhole networks. Versions of this theory have been used in the design of the routing algorithms for the MIT Reliable Router, the Cray T3E supercomputer, the on-chip router of the Alpha 21364 microprocessor, and the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer. Prof. Duato also developed RECN, the only truly scalable congestion management technique proposed to date, and a very efficient routing algorithm for fat trees that has been incorporated into Sun Microsystem's 3456-port InfiniBand Magnum switch. Currently, Prof. Duato leads the Advanced Technology Group in the HyperTransport Consortium, whose main result to date has been the development and standardization of an extension to HyperTransport (High Node Count HyperTransport Specification 1.0) that extends the device addressing capabilities of HyperTransport in several orders of magnitude.

Prof. Duato is the first author of the book "Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach". Dr. Duato served as a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. He has been the General Co-Chair for the 2001 International Conference on Parallel Processing, the Program Committee Chair for the Tenth International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA-10), and the Program Co-Chair for the 2005 International Conference on Parallel Processing. Also, he served as Co-Chair, member of the Steering Committee, Vice-Chair, or member of the Program Committee in more than 60 conferences, including the most prestigious conferences in his area (HPCA, ISCA, IPPS/SPDP, IPDPS, ICPP, ICDCS, Europar, HiPC).

Antony Rowstron

Title of the talk:

Rethinking the data center cluster: The CamCube approach

Summary:

Why do we build data center clusters in the way that we do? I will describe some of the work we are currently doing in the CamCube project which aims to build, from the ground up, a new data center cluster architecture designed to make it easier to create the large-scale services run on these clusters.

CamCube liberally borrows ideas from high performance computing, distributed systems and networking and represents a very different design point that blatantly violates many accepted norms of data center cluster architecture. The talk will motivate the design choices, including the use of a direct connect network (as used in HPC) and a new network stack that incorporates key-based routing functionallity.

In order to demonstrate the potential of CamCube, we will describe a number of services that have been written for CamCube, including a MapReduce-like service, that provide significantly better performance when run on CamCube compared to a traditional cluster.

About the speaker:

For the last 11 or so years Ant Rowstron has been working as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK where he is now a Principal Researcher and co-leads the Systems and Networking Group.

His research interests are broad, covering the spectrum of systems, distributed systems and networking, but he is best known for his work on structured overlays and distributed hash tables.

He received an MEng degree in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 1993 from the University of York, UK, and a DPhil degree in Computer Science in 1996 from the University of York, UK. In 1996 he moved to the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University, UK as a Research Associate and then moved to the Laboratory for Communications Engineering in the Engineering Department, Cambridge University, UK as a Senior Research Associate. Since 1999 he has worked at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.