Ant Rowstron
Deputy Lab Director,
Microsoft Research,
Cambridge, UK.
Email: antr@microsoft.com
I am a Deputy Lab Director (and Principal Researcher) 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, for more information see Project Silica, part of our #OpticsForTheCloud efforts. For
an overview of the work, see our recent HotStorage paper: Glass: A New
Media for a New Era? .
I was deeply
honored to be awarded the 2016 ACM SIGOPS
Mark Weiser Award.
Recent publications:
·
Patrick Anderson, Richard Black, Ausra Cerkauskaite, Andromachi
Chatzieleftheriou, James Clegg, Chris Dainty, Raluca Diaconu, Rokas Drevinskas,
Austin Donnelly, Alexander L. Gaunt, Andreas Georgiou, Ariel Gomez Diaz, Peter
G. Kazansky, David Lara, Sergey Legtchenko, Sebastian Nowozin, Aaron Ogus,
Douglas Phillips, Antony Rowstron, Masaaki Sakakura, Ioan Stefanovici, Benn
Thomsen, Lei Wang, Hugh Williams and Mengyang Yang, “Glass: A New Media for a New Era?”, HotStorage, July 2018. [ pdf ]
· Andromachi
Chatzieleftheriou, Sergey Legtchenko, Hugh Williams, and Antony Rowstron “Larry: Practical Network Reconfigurability
in the Data Center”, NSDI, April 2018. [ pdf ]
·
Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Sergey Legtchenko, Hugh
Williams, and Antony Rowstron, Microsoft Research 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