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, 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
]
·
Sergey Legtchenko, Xiaozhou Li,
Antony Rowstron, Austin Donnelly and Richard Black “Flamingo: Enabling Evolvable HDD-based Near-Line Storage”, FAST,
February 2016.[pdf
]
·
Ioan Stefanovici, Eno Thereska, Greg O'Shea, Bianca Schroeder, Hitesh
Ballani, Thomas Karagiannis, Antony Rowstron and Tom Talpey “Software-Defined Caching: Managing Caches
in Multi-Tenant Data Centers” in SOCC, August, 2015. [ 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