Ant Rowstron
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge
I lead the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
I work in Networked Systems, or in other words at the junction of Networking, Systems and Distributed Systems.
Most recently I have been interested in "big data" and in particular building hardware (clusters) and software stacks to support big data processing. We have been exploring this from a number of angles, including using ideas from HPC in the data center - in a project called CamCube.
In the past I have worked extensively on structured overlays or DHTs (P2P). I have also done some work on wireless protocols, application-level multicast, coordination languages, and even robotics.
I've been fortunate 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.
I was also deeply honoured recently that the original Pastry paper by Peter Druschel and me was awarded the "Middleware'2011 10-year best paper award".
Full publication list | Google ScholarRecent publications:
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Paolo Costa, Austin Donnelly, Ant Rowstron, Greg O'Shea. "Camdoop: Exploiting In-network Aggregation for Big Data Applications". Proceedings NSDI, April, 2012
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H. Ballani, P. Costa, T. Karagiannis and A. Rowstron. "Towards Predictable Datacenter Networks ". Proceedings ACM Sigcomm, Aug 2011.
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C. Wilson, H. Ballani, T. Karagiannis and A. Rowstron. "Better Never than Late: Meeting Deadlines in Datacenter Networks". Proceedings ACM Sigcomm, Aug 2011.
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H. Abu-Libdeh, P. Costa, A. Rowstron, G. O'Shea and A. Donnelly. "Symbiotic routing in future data centers" . Proceedings ACM Sigcomm, Aug 2010.
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Paolo Costa, Austin Donnelly, Ant Rowstron, Greg O'Shea. "Camdoop: Exploiting In-network Aggregation for Big Data Applications", NSDI, 2012
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C. Wilson, H. Ballani, T. Karagiannis and A. Rowstron. "Better Never than Late: Meeting Deadlines in Datacenter Networks",Sigcomm,2011.
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H. Ballani, P. Costa, T. Karagiannis and A. Rowstron. "Towards Predictable Datacenter Networks", Sigcomm, 2011.
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H. Abu-Libdeh, P. Costa, A. Rowstron, G. O'Shea and A. Donnelly. "Symbiotic routing in future data centers", Sigcomm, 2010.
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D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, E. Thereska, S. Elnikety and A. Rowstron. "Migrating server storage to SSDs: analysis of tradeoffs", EuroSys 2009.
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D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, E. Thereska, S. Elnikety and A. Rowstron. "Everest: Scaling down peak loads through I/O off-loading", OSDI, 2008.
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Karagiannis, R. Mortier and A. Rowstron. "Network exception handlers: host-network control in enterprise networks", Sigcomm, 2008
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D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly and A. Rowstron. "Write Off-loading: Practical power management for enterprise storage", FAST, 2008
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D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, R. Mortier and A. Rowstron. "Delay Aware Querying with Seaweed", VLDB, 2006
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M. Caesar, M. Castro, E. Nightingale, G. O'Shea and A. Rowstron, "Virtual Ring Routing: Network routing inspired by DHTs", Sigcomm, 2006.
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M. Costa, J. Crowcroft, M. Castro, A. Rowstron, L. Zhou, L. Zhang, and P. Barham, "Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worms", SOSP, 2005.
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M. Castro, M. Costa, and A. Rowstron, "Debunking some myths about structured and unstructured overlays", NSDI, 2005.
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L. Zhuang, F. Zhou, B. Y. Zhao and A. Rowstron, "Cashmere: Resilient Anonymous Routing", NSDI, 2005.
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M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M. Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream: High-bandwidth multicast in a cooperative environment", SOSP, 2003.
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M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M. Kermarrec and A. Rowstron, "SCRIBE: A large-scale and decentralized application-level multicast infrastructure", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC), October 2002.
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M. Castro, P. Druschel, A. Ganesh, A. Rowstron, and D. S. Wallach, "Security for structured peer-to-peer overlay networks", OSDI, December 2002.
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S. Iyer, A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, "SQUIRREL: A decentralized, peer-to-peer web cache", PODC, July 2002.
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A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, "Pastry: Scalable, decentralized object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems", Middleware, 2001.
[ pdf ] (10 year best paper award from Middleware awarded in 2011) -
A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, "Storage management and caching in PAST, a large-scale, persistent peer-to-peer storage utility", SOSP, October 2001.
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A-M Kermarrec, A. Rowstron, M. Shapiro and P. Druschel. "The IceCube approach to the reconciliation of divergent replicas", PODC, 2001.
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Professional activities:
I have been involved or am on the Program Committee or related for the following workshops and conferences:
SIGCOMM 2012, SOCC 2012, SOSP 2011, Middleware 2011, MobiHeld 2011, Sigcomm 2010, NSDI 2010, Middleware 2010, MobiHeld 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
Can we build a better plaform to build distributed apps than the current clusters deployed in data centers? We've been builidng out 3D Torus based clusters and we have a MapReduce like system running on it. Here is the paper:
Paolo Costa, Austin Donnelly, Ant Rowstron, Greg O'Shea. "Camdoop: Exploiting In-network Aggregation for Big Data Applications". Proceedings NSDI, April, 2012 [ pdf ]
If you want to do big data then it is really simple - buy a cluster and then run Hadoop on it - or is that really the answer? Looking at job sizes and memory price trends gives a hint that there may be other answers. This is the first step - a provacative workshop paper designed to get people thinking.
Antony Rowstron, Dushyanth Narayanan, Austin Donnelly, Greg O’Shea and Andrew Douglas "Nobody ever got fired for using Hadoop on a cluster" [ pdf ] to appear in April in HotCDP 2012.