I am a researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. My interests are in distributed and concurrent systems, especially in their performance analysis. I am currently working on Naiad, a scalable, data-parallel computation system that is very efficient for iterative algorithms and when there are incremental changes to the input data. Check out our code release and the Big Data at SVC blog. Naiad is in collaboration with Frank McSherry, Derek Murray, Michael Isard and Martin Abadi.
I previously worked on Barrelfish, together with other MSR researchers including Andrew Baumann, Tim Harris (now at Oracle Labs), and Paul Barham, and also with Timothy Roscoe and students from the Systems Group at ETH Zurich. The main goal of the Barrelfish project (which is still going strong) is to explore how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems.
Past projects include Constellation, Anemone and Magpie.
Activities
Program committee member for SOSP 2013, NSDI 2013, ASPLOS 2012, SOSP 2011, EuroSys 2011, HotOS XII 2009, EuroSys 2009, ASPLOS 2009, NSDI 2007, HotOS XI 2007, HotNets-V 2006, NSDI 2006.
Member of the EuroSys Steering Committee, and on the Roger Needham PhD Award review committee. PC co-chair for Usenix ATC 2008. Organiser of the SOSP Shadow PC in 2007 and the EuroSys 2010 Doctoral Workshop.
- Frank McSherry, Derek G. Murray, Rebecca Isaacs, and Michael Isard, Differential dataflow, in Proceedings of CIDR 2013, 5 January 2013
- Frank McSherry, Rebecca Isaacs, Michael Isard, and Derek G. Murray, Composable Incremental and Iterative Data-Parallel Computation with Naiad, no. MSR-TR-2012-105, 9 October 2012
- Tim Harris, Martin Abadi, Rebecca Isaacs, and Ross McIlroy, AC: Composable Asynchronous IO for Native Languages , in OOPSLA 2011, ACM, October 2011
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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, 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
- Timothy Roscoe, Steve Hand, Rebecca Isaacs, Richard Mortier, and Paul Jardetzky, Predicate Routing: Enabling Controlled Networking, in Proceedings of HotNets-I (2002), Computer Communication Review (CCR), vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 65–70, January 2003
- Simon Crosby, Sean Rooney, Rebecca Isaacs, and Herbert Bos, A perspective on how ATM lost control, in Computer Communication Review, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 25–28, November 2002
- 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
