Paul Barham
I am currently a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab. My research interests include performance analysis of distributed systems, operating systems and virtualization.
I'm currently working on a number of interesting systems projects, including Naiad.
Previous projects have included the Barrelfish multi-kernel operating system, the Xen virtual machine monitor, the Singularity managed code research OS, Vigilante (a system to automatically prevent internet worms), Magpie, Constellation, and Anemone.
Until July 2010, I was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where I led the Systems and Networking group.
I obtained my B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 1992 and my Ph.D. in 1996 for the Nemesis operating system. I continued research in the Systems Research Group at the Computer Laboratory as a Research Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Before I joined Microsoft Research, I worked on devices and operating system abstractions for the Desk Area Network, Quality of Service for I/O and virtual memory in the Nemesis operating system, and resource allocation using on-line measurement techniques in the Measure project.
When I'm not working I'm often sculling or playing the drums.
Recent PC membership
Usenix 2012, Usenix10 (co-chair), SOSP09, Eurosys08, NSDI08, SOSP07, HotDEP07
Projects
- NaiadNaiad is an investigation of data-parallel dataflow computation in the spirit of Dryad and DryadLINQ, but with a focus on incremental computation. Naiad introduces a new computational model, differential dataflow, operating over collections of differences rather than collections of records, and resulting in very efficient implementations of programming patterns that are expensive in existing systems.
- Barrelfish Barrelfish is a new operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between researchers at ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research, Cambridge. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. The motivation is two closely related hardware trends: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to scalability challenges, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.
- ConstellationConstellation is a system that uses packet information monitored at endsystems in conjunction with machine learning techniques to construct models of network service behaviour and dependency, which can be queried to determine likely causes for service misbehaviour. This is a joint project involving researchers at Cambridge and Silicon Valley.
- AnemoneAnemone is a project investigating management of enterprise networks. It aims to build a network management platform based around two main components: (i) end-system flow monitoring, providing the inputs to the system; and (ii) monitoring of the network routeing protocols, providing current system configuration. By aggregating and querying these data sources in a distributed fashion, Anemone will provide a platform on which network management applications can be built to provide tools for visualization, what-if analysis, and control of the network.
- SingularityOS and tools for building dependable systems
- MagpieMagpie extracts the resource usage and control path of individual requests in a distributed system. It currently runs on a typical e-commerce web farm setup comprising IIS, ASP.NET and SQL Server. Events produced by the live system are correlated to extract the individual requests using a temporal join technique. The requests are then clustered according to resource consumption and behaviour in order to construct concise workload models.
Publications
- Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Paul Barham, Andrew Baumann, Rebecca Isaacs, Tim Harris, and Timothy Roscoe, Design Principles for End-to-End Multicore Schedulers, in Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism, USENIX, Berkeley, CA, USA, June 2010
- Andrew Baumann, Paul Barham, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Tim Harris, Rebecca Isaacs, Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe, Adrian Schüpbach, and Akhilesh Singhania, The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems, in 22nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2009
- Miguel Castro, Manuel Costa, Jean-Philippe Martin, Marcus Peinado, Periklis Akritidis, Austin Donnelly, Paul Barham, and Richard Black, Fast Byte-Granularity Software Fault Isolation, in ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2009
- Andrew Baumann, Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Akhilesh Singhania, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, and Rebecca Isaacs, Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS?, in 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, USENIX, May 2009
- Manuel Costa, Jon Crowcroft, Miguel Castro, Antony Rowstron, Lidong Zhou, Lintao Zhang, and Paul Barham, Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worm Epidemics, in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, December 2008
- Aleksander Simma, Moises Goldszmidt, John MacCormick, Paul Barham, Richard Black, Rebecca Isaacs, and Richard Mortier, CT-NOR: Representing and reasoning about events in continuous time, in International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Helsinki, Finland, July 2008
- Adrian Schüpbach, Simon Peter, Andrew Baumann, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, Tim Harris, and Rebecca Isaacs, Embracing diversity in the Barrelfish manycore operating system, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2008
- Simon Peter, Andrew Baumann, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, and Rebecca Isaacs, 30 seconds is not enough! A Study of Operating System Timer Usage, in Eurosys, ACM Eurosys, April 2008
- Paul Barham, Richard Black, Moises Goldszmidt, Rebecca Isaacs, John MacCormick, Richard Mortier, and Aleksandr Simma, Constellation: automated discovery of service and host dependencies in networked systems, no. MSR-TR-2008-67, April 2008
- Paramvir Bahl, Paul Barham, Richard Black, Ranveer Chandra, Moises Goldszmidt, Rebecca Isaacs, Srikanth Kandula, Lun Li, John MacCormick, David A. Maltz, Richard Mortier, Mike Wawrzoniak, and Ming Zhang, Discovering Dependencies for Network Management, in Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-V), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., Irvine, California, November 2006
- Evan Cooke, Richard Mortier, Austin Donnelly, Paul Barham, and Rebecca Isaacs, Reclaiming network-wide visibility using ubiquitous end system monitors, in USENIX 2006 Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, June 2006
- Paul Barham, Rebecca Isaacs, Richard Mortier, and Tim Harris, Learning communication patterns in Singularity, in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Tackling Computer Systems Problems with Machine Learning Techniques (SysML), June 2006
- Galen C. Hunt, Mark Aiken, Paul Barham, Manuel Fahndrich, Chris Hawblitzel, Orion Hodson, James R. Larus, Steven Levi, Nick Murphy, Bjarne Steensgaard, David Tarditi, Ted Wobber, and Brian D. Zill, Sealing OS Processes to Improve Dependability and Security, no. MSR-TR-2006-51, April 2006
- Manuel Costa, Jon Crowcroft, Miguel Castro, Antony Rowstron, Lidong Zhou, Lintao Zhang, and Paul Barham, Stopping Internet Epidemics, in Proceedings of the International Zurich Seminar on Communications (IZS'06), February 2006
- Galen Hunt, James R. Larus, Martin Abadi, Mark Aiken, Paul Barham, Manuel Fahndrich, Chris Hawblitzel, Orion Hodson, Steven Levi, Nick Murphy, Bjarne Steensgaard, David Tarditi, Ted Wobber, and Brian D. Zill, An Overview of the Singularity Project, no. MSR-TR-2005-135, October 2005
- Manuel Costa, Jon Crowcroft, Miguel Castro, Antony Rowstron, Lidong Zhou, Lintao Zhang, and Paul Barham, Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worms, in ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), ACM Press, Birghton, UK, October 2005
- Richard Mortier, Rebecca Isaacs, and Paul Barham, Anemone: using end-systems as a rich network management platform, in Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mining Network Data (MineNet'05), August 2005
- Richard Mortier, Rebecca Isaacs, Austin Donnelly, and Paul Barham, Anemone: Edge-based network management, in INFOCOM 2005, IEEE Communications Society, March 2005
- Paul Barham, Austin Donnelly, Rebecca Isaacs, and Richard Mortier, Using Magpie for request extraction and workload modelling, in Proceedings of the Sixth USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) 2004, USENIX, December 2004
- Rebecca Isaacs, Paul Barham, James Bulpin, Richard Mortier, and Dushyanth Narayanan, Request extraction in Magpie: events, schemas, and temporal joins, in Proceedings of ACM SIGOPS European Workshop (SIGOPS EW'04), ACM, Leuven, Belgium, September 2004
- Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield, Xen and the Art of Virtualization, in Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '03), October 2003
- Paul Barham, Rebecca Isaacs, Richard Mortier, and Dushyanth Narayanan, Magpie: online modelling and performance-aware systems, in 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-IX), USENIX, Lihue, Hawaii, May 2003
- Paul R. Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir A. Fraser, Steven M. Hand, Timothy L. Harris, Alex C. Ho, Evangelos Kotsovinos, Anil V.S. Madhavapeddy, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian A. Pratt, and Andrew K. Warfield, Xen 2002, no. UCAM-CL-TR-553, January 2003
- Rebecca Isaacs and Paul Barham, Performance analysis in loosely-coupled distributed systems, in 7th Cabernet Radicals Workshop, October 2002
- Paul Barham, Steve Hand, Rebecca Isaacs, Paul Jardetzky, Richard Mortier, and Timothy Roscoe, Techniques for Lightweight Concealment and Authentication in IP Networks, no. IRB-TR-02-009, July 2002
