Ant Rowstron
Principal Researcher and
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. My current research effort is
focused on creating the technologies and systems that will underpin the future
cloud- in
particular focusing on
hardware/software co-design of racks and storage 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
]
Full
publication list is available here (and probably more
up to date on Google
Scholar!)
I do systems research at the junction of Networking, Systems, Storage and Distributed Systems and recently my work has
been heavily focused on an area called rack-scale computers. Over the years 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 first DHTs, called Pastry, and the 2001 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.
Some of the work described in our IOFlow paper
(SOSP’13) around opening up the storage stack and providing QoS
primitives in the storage stack 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 vNext
(see
blog posting). There is some other stuff but it is less public.
Past
projects with web sites:
·
Predictable
Data Centers (inc. IOFlow and Software Defined Storage)
·
CamCube
·
Pastry web site
(Distributed Hash Table) For later projects please see this page. Some of the
key publications from Pastry and the related applications:
o
Rowstron and P. Druschel, "Pastry: Scalable,
distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer
systems", Middleware'2001, Germany, November 2001. [ pdf ]
o
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 ]
o
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 ]
o
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
]
o
M. Castro, M. Costa, and A. Rowstron, "Debunking
some myths about structured and unstructured overlays", NSDI'05, Boston,
MA, USA, May 2005. [ pdf
]
o
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:
·
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 ]
For the last 17 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 1997
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
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