Ant Rowstron
Principal
Researcher,
Microsoft
Research Cambridge
Email: antr@microsoft.com
Active
Research Projects:
·
Pelican
·
Predictable
Data Centers (inc. IOFlow
and Software Defined Storage)
Recent
publications:
·
Shobana Balakrishnan, Richard Black,
Austin Donnelly, Paul England, Adam Glass, Dave Harper, Sergey Legtchenko, A,
Ogus, E. Peterson and A. Rowstron “Pelican:
A building block for exascale cold data storage” in OSDI, October 2014 [ pdf
]
·
Fahad R Dogar, Thomas Karagiannis,
Hitesh Ballani, and Antony Rowstron, “Decentralized
Task-aware Scheduling for Data Center Networks”, in SIGCOMM, ACM, August
2014 [ pdf
]
·
Eno Thereska, Hitesh Ballani, Greg
O'Shea, Thomas Karagiannis, Antony Rowstron, Tom Talpey, and Timothy Zhu “IOFlow: A Software-Defined Storage Architecture”
SOSP'13, Farmington, PA, USA, November, 2013. [pdf
]
Full
publication list is available here (and probably more up to date on Google
Scholar!)
I work on systems that
lie at the intersection of Networking, Systems, Storage and Distributed
Systems, and I also lead the Systems
and Networking group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. My recent work has
been heavily focused on increasing performance, reducing the cost of and
increasing the agility of data centers.
I have worked in
several areas, including structured overlays or Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs),
wireless routing protocols and even Robot Football (RoboCup’98). The paper on Pastry written with Peter
Druschel was awarded the "Middleware'2011 10-year
best paper award".
Several things I
worked on have passed over from research to the wider world in one way or
another - for example the work on Pastry directly contributed to both the Windows DRT
API and the related Windows PNRP API (the former even includes a leaf set). LiveStation licensed some of
our P2P work around Pastry and SplitStream. More recently, some of the work
described in our IOFlow paper (SOSP’13) resulted in the SMB Bandwidth Limiting
feature in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Most
of my current research effort is focused on creating the technologies that will
underpin future cloud- based computing platforms. The work is split into
systems and tools that demonstrate how emerging and new hardware can be adopted
and software infrastructure to support better resource management in our data
centers.
The
interest in hardware stems for work on the CamCube project that explored how distributed networks
that directly connect servers to each other performed with data center
workloads. This removed the need for a dedicated ToR switch, and distributed
its functionality across the servers, The AMD SeaMicro fabric compute systems
and other such systems, are now commercially available and provide this size of
cluster as we envisaged. The general availability of these systems, and the
rise of disaggregated computing, and more emerging hardware that supports this
kind of direct connect paradigm, I am continuing to look at some of the related
issues. In particular, CamCube and these commercial systems also demonstrate
the value of thinking at the rack-scale – creating Rack-Scale
Computing project.
One of
the first products of the Rack-Scale Computing project, is a system called
Pelican, which is designed to provide storage for cold data, e.g. data that is
written once and read rarely. Pelican uses right-provisioning, and has a
converged design: the power, cooling, hardware and software are all
co-designed. We have demonstrated how to build a cold storage system that much
lower capital and operating expenses for storing cold data.
Managing
resources in a data center is important and the Predictable
Data Center Project explores how
to build the software infrastructure to help manage resources such as the
network and storage. The work started in the context of networking (Towards
Predictable Datacenter Networks SIGCOMM’11) but, then expanded to think about
storage. In the process we’ve had to open the storage stack, to allow us to
create an explicit data and control plane, the equivalent for storage of
Software Defined Networking, a sort of Software Defined Storage (IOFlow,
SOSP’13).
Past projects with web sites:
·
CamCube
·
Pastry
(Distributed Hash Table) and related overlay work: The original Pastry web
site (Pastry, Squirrel, PAST, Scribe and SplitStream). For later projects
please see this page.
Some
of the key publications from Pastry and the related applications:
§
Rowstron and P. Druschel, "Pastry:
Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer
systems", Middleware'2001, Germany, November 2001. [ pdf.zip
| ps.zip
| pdf | ps ]
§
M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M.
Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream:
High-bandwidth multicast in cooperative environments", SOSP'03, Lake
Bolton, New York, October, 2003. [ pdf.zip | ps.zip | pdf | ps ]
§
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.zip
| ps.zip
| pdf
| ps ]
§
M. Castro, P. Druschel, A. Ganesh,
A. Rowstron, and D. S. Wallach, "Secure routing 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.zip
| ps.zip
| pdf |
ps ]
§
M. Castro, M. Costa, and A.
Rowstron, "Debunking some myths about structured and unstructured
overlays", NSDI'05, Boston, MA, USA, May 2005. [ ps | pdf ]
§
M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M.
Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream:
High-bandwidth multicast in cooperative environments", SOSP,
2003. [ pdf
]
Selected publications from my time at
Microsoft Research:
· Shobana Balakrishnan, Richard Black, Austin Donnelly, Paul
England, Adam Glass, Dave Harper, Sergey Legtchenko, A, Ogus, E. Peterson and
A. Rowstron “Pelican: A building block for exascale cold data storage” in OSDI, October 2014 [ pdf
]
· Fahad R Dogar, Thomas Karagiannis, Hitesh Ballani, and
Antony Rowstron, “Decentralized Task-aware Scheduling for Data Center Networks”,
in SIGCOMM, ACM, August 2014 [ pdf
]
· Eno Thereska, Hitesh Ballani, Greg O'Shea, Thomas
Karagiannis, Antony Rowstron, Tom Talpey, and Timothy Zhu “IOFlow: A Software-Defined
Storage Architecture” SOSP'13, Farmington, PA, USA, November, 2013. [ pdf
]
·
Christos Gkantsidis,
Dimitris Vytiniotis, Orion Hodson, Dushyanth Narayanan, Florin Dinu, Antony
Rowstron "Rhea: Automatic Filtering for Unstructured Cloud Storage",
NSDI , April 2013 [ pdf
]
·
Virajith
Jalaparti, Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa. Thomas Karagiannis and Antony Rowstron
"Bridging the Tenant-Provider Gap in Cloud Services". Proceedings
SOCC, Oct, 2012 [ pdf
]
·
Paolo Costa,
Austin Donnelly, Ant Rowstron, Greg O'Shea. "Camdoop: Exploiting
In-network Aggregation for Big Data Applications", NSDI, 2012 [ pdf
]
·
C. Wilson, H.
Ballani, T. Karagiannis and A. Rowstron. "Better Never than Late: Meeting
Deadlines in Datacenter Networks",Sigcomm,2011. [ pdf
]
·
H. Ballani, P.
Costa, T. Karagiannis and A. Rowstron. "Towards Predictable Datacenter
Networks", Sigcomm, 2011. [ pdf
]
·
H. Abu-Libdeh, P. Costa, A.
Rowstron, G. O'Shea and A. Donnelly. "Symbiotic routing in future data
centers", Sigcomm, 2010. [ pdf
]
·
D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, E.
Thereska, S. Elnikety and A. Rowstron. "Migrating server storage to SSDs:
analysis of tradeoffs", EuroSys 2009. [ pdf ]
·
D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, E.
Thereska, S. Elnikety and A. Rowstron. "Everest: Scaling down peak loads
through I/O off-loading", OSDI, 2008. [ pdf]
·
T. Karagiannis, R. Mortier and A.
Rowstron. "Network exception handlers: host-network control in enterprise
networks", Sigcomm, 2008 [ pdf]
·
D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly and A.
Rowstron. "Write Off-loading: Practical power management for enterprise
storage", FAST, 2008 [ pdf ] (invited
to submit to ACM TOS)
·
D. Narayanan, A. Donnelly, R.
Mortier and A. Rowstron. "Delay Aware Querying with Seaweed", VLDB,
2006 [ ps
| pdf
] (forwarded to the VLDB Journal best of 2006)
·
M. Caesar, M. Castro, E.
Nightingale, G. O'Shea and A. Rowstron, "Virtual Ring Routing: Network
routing inspired by DHTs", Sigcomm, 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, 2005.[ ps |
pdf ]
·
M. Castro, M. Costa, and A.
Rowstron, "Debunking some myths about structured and unstructured
overlays", NSDI, 2005. [ pdf ]
·
L. Zhuang, F. Zhou, B. Y. Zhao and
A. Rowstron, "Cashmere: Resilient Anonymous Routing", NSDI, 2005. [
pdf ]
·
M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M.
Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream:
High-bandwidth multicast in cooperative environments", SOSP,
2003. [ pdf
]
·
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. [ pdf ]
·
M. Castro, P. Druschel, A. Ganesh,
A. Rowstron, and D. S. Wallach, "Secure routing for structured
peer-to-peer overlay networks", OSDI, December 2002. [ pdf ]
·
S. Iyer, A. Rowstron and P.
Druschel, "SQUIRREL: A decentralized, peer-to-peer web cache",
PODC, July 2002. [ pdf ]
·
A. Rowstron and P. Druschel,
"Pastry: Scalable, decentralized object location and routing for
large-scale peer-to-peer systems", Middleware, 2001. [ pdf ]
o
(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. [ pdf
]
· A-M Kermarrec, A. Rowstron, M. Shapiro and P. Druschel.
"The IceCube approach to the reconciliation of divergent replicas",
PODC, 2001.
[ pdf ]
For the
last 15 or so years I have been working as a researcher at Microsoft Research in
Cambridge, UK where I am now a Principal Researcher and lead the Systems and
Networking Group. My research interests are broad, covering the spectrum of
systems, distributed systems, storage and networking. In May of 2010 I was
elected as a Fellow of the British Computer Society. I 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 also from the
University of York, UK.
In 1996
I 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, as a Senior Research
Associate. During my time at Cambridge University I was a consultant for the
Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) (which became the AT&T
Research Cambridge in 1998 and has now sadly closed). In 1999 I moved to
Microsoft Research Ltd in Cambridge, UK.
I have been involved or am on the
Program Committee or related for the following workshops and conferences:
EUROSYS 2014 (co-chair), 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
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