Ant Rowstron
Principal
Researcher/Deputy Lab Director,
Microsoft Research,
Cambridge, UK.
Email: antr@microsoft.com
I am a Principal Researcher and Deputy Lab Director at Microsoft Research
in Cambridge, where I lead the Systems
and Networking Team. I am focused on creating new technologies that will underpin Azure’s future cloud infrastructure.
I work closely with colleagues in Azure, and my current focus is on creating
new storage systems for the cloud. As well as pushing existing technologies, we
are looking how to use recent discoveries in enabling data to be written in
quartz glass for long term archival storage. Project Silica was publicly featured
in an Ignite 2017 talk on future storage technologies for the cloud. I was
deeply honored to be awarded the 2016 ACM SIGOPS
Mark Weiser Award.
Recent publications:
·
Sergey Legtchenko, Hugh
Williams, Kaveh Razavi, Austin Donnelly, Richard
Black, Andrew Douglas, Nathanael Cheriere, Daniel
Fryer, Kai Mast, Angela Demke Brown, Ana Klimovic, Andy Slowey, Antony Rowstron “Understanding Rack-Scale Disaggregated
Storage”, in HotStorage,
July 2017. [ pdf ]
·
Richard Black, Austin Donnelly, Dave Harper, Aaron Ogus, Antony Rowstron “Feeding
the Pelican: Using Archival Hard Drives for Cold Storage Racks”, in HotStorage, June 2016. [ pdf ]
·
Sergey Legtchenko, Nicholas
Chen, Daniel Cletheroe, Antony Rowstron,
Hugh Williams, and Xiaohan Zhao “XFabric: A Reconfigurable In-Rack Network for Rack-Scale Computers”, in NSDI, March
2016. [ pdf ]
·
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 ]
My full publication list (and on Google
Scholar)
I am a systems researcher working at the intersection of Storage,
Networking, Systems and Distributed Systems. During my
career, I have worked in several areas, including structured overlays or
Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), wireless routing protocols and even Robot
Football (RoboCup’98). I worked on one of the original DHTs, called Pastry
(Middleware’01), and of the first large-scale key-value stores (PAST SOSP’01).
I’m proud to say that the original Pastry paper written with Peter Druschel was awarded
the "Middleware'2011
10-year best paper award".
I try to select research themes to work on that I believe will have an impact in the real world. Often it turns out my
belief is misplaced, but occasionally not! The work on distributed systems has
had some internal impact; 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 (SOSP’03). We evangelized the work on Squirrel
(PODC’02) to many teams, and then BranchCache was created.
Since moving to focus more on storage; IOFlow
(SOSP’13) resulted in the SMB Bandwidth Limiting feature in Windows Server 2012
R2, and also inspired the end-to-end Storage QoS feature in Windows Server 2016
(see
blog). Pelican (OSDI’14) is now owned by Azure, and they described it in an Ignite 2017 talk.
Selected
publications from my time at Microsoft Research:
·
Sergey Legtchenko, Nicholas
Chen, Daniel Cletheroe, Antony Rowstron,
Hugh Williams, and Xiaohan Zhao “XFabric:
A Reconfigurable In-Rack Network for Rack-Scale Computers”, in NSDI, March
2016. [ pdf
]
·
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 [ 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. [ 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.[ 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 ]
Since May 1999 I have been working at Microsoft Research
in the UK, where today I am a Principal Researcher and a Deputy Lab Director.
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
and a DPhil degree in Computer Science in 1997 both from the University of
York, UK. After completing my DPhil studies, I joined Cambridge University in
November 1996, initially as a Research Associate in the Computer Laboratory and
then as a Senior Research Associate in the Engineering Department, Cambridge.
During this time, I was a consultant for the Olivetti and Oracle Research
Laboratory (ORL) (which became the AT&T Research Cambridge in 1998).
I have been
involved or am on the Program Committee or related for the following workshops
and conferences:
EuroSys 2017, SC 2016, 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