Ant Rowstron

Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge

I co-lead the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.








I work in Networked Systems, or in otherwords at the junction of Networking, Systems and Distributed Systems. Currently my main focus is on the design of the next generation of large-scale data centres - in a project we call BorgCube. We want to make the BorgCube a simpler platform on which to run (distributed) services. We are trying to do this by closing the gap between the network, servers and services. We use a direct connect topology and are taking inspiration from  HPC, distributed systems and networking fields.  The physical topology that we have chosen is very similar to the CAN overlay topology and we leverage the explicity structure of the topology. We also provide a low-level link orientrated API.

In the past I have worked on DHTs / overlays /P2P, wireless, application-level multicast, coordination languages, and even robotics.

I've been quite lucky in that odd things I worked on have passed over from research to the wider world in one way or another - for example the functionality of the Windows DRT API seems quite close to the KBR API used in Pastry, and even includes a leaf set..... and LiveStation licensed some of our p2p work on content streaming.

Full publication list

Recent publications:

  • T. Zhan, G. O'Shea and A. Rowstron, "Feasibility of Content Dissemination between Devices in Moving Vehicles " Proceedings of CoNext, December 2009. [ pdf ]

  • P. Costa, T. Zhan, A. Rowstron, G. O'Shea and S. Schubert. "Why should we integrate services, servers, and networking in a Data Center?" Proceedings of WREN, August 2009.
    [ pdf ]

  • D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, E. Thereska, S. Elnikety and A. Rowstron. "Migrating server storage to SSDs: analysis of tradeoffs" Proceedings of EuroSys 2009, Nuremberg, Germany, April 2009. [ pdf ]

  • D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, E. Thereska, S. Elnikety and A. Rowstron. "Everest: Scaling down peak loads through I/O off-loading " Proceedings of OSDI 2008, San Francisco, USA Dec. 2008 [ pdf ]

  • T. Karagiannis, R. Mortier and A. Rowstron. "Network exception handlers: host-network control in enterprise networks" Proceedings of Sigcomm 2008, Seattle, USA Aug. 2008 [ pdf ]

Selected publications:

  • D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, R. Mortier and A. Rowstron. "Delay Aware Querying with Seaweed" Proceedings of 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2006), September 2006
    [ ps | pdf ]     (forwarded to the VLDB Journal best of 2006)

  • D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly and A. Rowstron. "Write Off-loading: Practical power management for enterprise storage" Proceedings of 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, Feb. 2008 [ pdf ] (invited to submit to ACM TOS)

  • M. Caesar, M. Castro, E. Nightingale, G. O'Shea and A. Rowstron, "Virtual Ring Routing: Network routing inspired by DHTs", Sigcomm 2006, Pisa, Italy, September 2006.  [ ps | pdf ]

  • M. Costa, J. Crowcroft, M. Castro, A. Rowstron, L. Zhou, L. Zhang, and P. Barham, "Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worms", SOSP'05, Brighton, UK, October 2005. [ ps | pdf ]

  • A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, "Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems", Middleware'2001, Germany, November 2001.
    [ pdf ]

    M. Castro, M. Costa, and A. Rowstron, "Debunking some myths about structured and unstructured overlays", NSDI'05, Boston, MA, USA, May 2005.
    [ pdf ]

  • L. Zhuang, F. Zhou, B. Y. Zhao and A. Rowstron, "Cashmere: Resilient Anonymous Routing", NSDI'05, Boston, MA, USA, May 2005.
    [ pdf ]

  • M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M. Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream: High-bandwidth multicast in a cooperative environment", SOSP'03, Lake Bolton, New York, October, 2003.  
    [ pdf  ]

  • A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, "Storage management and caching in PAST, a large-scale, persistent peer-to-peer storage utility", 18th SOSP'01, Banff, Canada, October 2001. 
    [ pdf  ]      

  • M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M. Kermarrec  and A. Rowstron, "SCRIBE: A large-scale and decentralised application-level multicast infrastructure", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC), Vol. 20, No, 8, October 2002. 
    [ pdf  ]

  • M. Castro, P. Druschel, A. Ganesh, A. Rowstron, and D. S. Wallach, "Security for structured peer-to-peer overlay networks".  In Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'02), Boston, MA, December 2002.
    [ pdf  ]

  • S. Iyer, A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, "SQUIRREL: A decentralized, peer-to-peer web cache", 21st ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2002), Monterey, CA, USA, July 2002.
    [ pdf  ]

  • A-M Kermarrec, A. Rowstron, M. Shapiro and P. Druschel. "The IceCube approach to the reconciliation of divergent replicas", 20th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2001), 2001.
    [.pdf     ]

Professional activities:

I have been involved or am on the Program Committee or related for the following workshops and conferences:

Sigcomm 2010, NSDI 2010, IPTPS 2010, Middleware 2009, PerCom 2009, Workshop co-chair Sigcomm 2009, Middleware 2008, FAST 2008, Middleware 2007, INFOCOM 2007, ACM SIGCOMM 2006, EUROSYS 2006, IPTPS 2006, MobiShare 2006 (co-chair), DSN 2006, INFOCOM 2006, WORLDS 2005, P2P Economics workshop 2005, Euro-par 2005 (Track vice-chair), ICDCS 2005 (Track chair), IEEE INFOCOM 2005, SIGOPS EW 2004, ACM SIGCOMM 2004, WDDDM 2004, Coordination 2004,  ACM SIGCOMM 2003, ACM PODC 2003, IEEE OpenArch 2003,  WWW  2003, SecCo 2003, IPTPS'02 (co-chair),  International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Computing 2002, WETICE'02, ESAW'01, WETICE'01, ESAW'00

Locations of visitors to this page

 

News

Our broadside paper will appear in CoNext in a couple of weeks. [ pdf ]

25/8/2009 Just returned from attending Sigcomm in Barcelona.

22/6/2009 Had a great day on the Aston Martin test track testing some in-car wireless technology!