Ant Rowstron
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Pastry (Distributed Hash Table) and related overlay work
For later projects that were done just inside of MSR - please see this page.
Pastry is a large-scale decentralised key-based routing infrastructure for peer-to-peer applications. It is from the family of protocols that are commonly known as Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) and use the KBR API.
Pastry has been used in a wide variety of applications including web caching (Squirrel), archival file storage (PAST), application-level multicast (Scribe) and video/content streaming (SplitStream). Some of the key publications from Pastry and the related applications:
A. Rowstron and P. Druschel,
"Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for
large-scale peer-to-peer systems", Middleware'2001, Germany,
November 2001.
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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'03,
Lake Bolton, New York, October, 2003.
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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.
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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.
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M. Castro, M. Costa, and A. Rowstron, "Debunking some myths about
structured and unstructured overlays",
NSDI'05, Boston, MA, USA, May 2005.
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Beyond overlays
In the last few years I have been exploring how to take key concepts from overlays and apply them to other areas. Currently I am very interested in understanding the differences between a physical and virtual topology and have been exploring this in the context of CamCube.