I am a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, and I lead a team
looking at future technologies for the cloud. Many of the projects we run in the team are focused on creating and exploring new
optical-based technologies for the cloud across storage, networking and compute. Examples of the sort of projects the lab does are Project Silica, which is looking at how to store data in Fused Silica (basically glass) as a replacement for tape for long term archival storage.
As a systems researcher, I have spent most of my career working at the intersection of Storage, Networking, and Distributed Systems. More recently I have been learning a lot about Optical Systems. During my career, I have been fortunate enough to work several areas, including structured overlays or Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), wireless routing protocols and even Robot Football (RoboCup 1998). I worked with Peter Druschel on one of the original DHTs, called Pastry (Middleware 2001 and awarded their 10 year test of time award in 2011) and on one of the first highly distributed key-value stores (PAST SOSP 2001).
Here are some images of data being stored in glass starting in 2017 through to 2019. To learn more about how we write the data look at this animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzHsibqpIs.
Robotics
I have been fascinated by Robotics since I took part in RoboCup 1998. With Silica we had the chance to explore robotics for storage systems (see below) and in May 2023 with the progress in deep learning and foundational models it seemed like a good time to revisit robotics in more depth. So, I have started forming a robotics group in Microsoft Research Cambridge with an emphasis on how we can develop dexterous and skilled robotics to help make data centers self-maintaining. We have some incredible people in the team, and building on the Silica library robotics we have some awesome robots coming soon. The team got its first ICRA paper accepted in 2024 about the Silica Library. We have recently published about our work looking at using robotics to help automate common networking tasks in HotNets 2024 (here).
Sounds exciting? We are always looking for really talented
people who would like to join the team, especially people who are interested in
internships or post-doc positions, from a wide range of backgrounds.
Recent publications:
"Self-maintaining [networked] systems: The rise of datacenter robotics!" Freddie Hong, Iason Sarantopoulos, Elliott Hogg, David Richardson, Yizhong Zhang, Hugh Williams, David Sweeney, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Antony Rowstron. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), Nov 2024 [ pdf ]
"RASCAL: A Scalable, High-Redundancy Robot for Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems" Richard Black, Marco Caballero, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Tim Deegan, Philip Heard, Freddie Hong, Russell Joyce, Sergey Legtchenko, Antony Rowstron, Adam Smith, David Sweeney, Hugh Williams. Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2024 [ pdf ]
"Project Silica: Towards Sustainable Cloud Archival Storage in Glass" Patrick Anderson, Erika Blancada Aranas, Youssef Assaf, Raphael Behrendt, Richard Black, Marco Caballero, Pashmina Cameron, Burcu Canakci, Thales De Carvalho, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Rebekah Storan Clarke, James Clegg, Daniel Cletheroe, Bridgette Cooper, Tim Deegan, Austin Donnelly, Rokas Drevinskas, Alexander Gaunt, Christos Gkantsidis, Ariel Gomez Diaz, Istvan Haller, Freddie Hong, Teodora Ilieva, Shashidhar Joshi, Russell Joyce, Mint Kunkel, David Lara, Sergey Legtchenko, Fanglin Linda Liu, Bruno Magalhaes, Alana Marzoev, Marvin Mcnett, Jayashree Mohan, Michael Myrah, Trong Nguyen, Sebastian Nowozin, Aaron Ogus, Hiske Overweg, Antony Rowstron, Maneesh Sah, Masaaki Sakakura, Peter Scholtz, Nina Schreiner, Omer Sella, Adam Smith, Ioan Stefanovici, David Sweeney, Benn Thomsen, Govert Verkes, Phil Wainman, Jonathan Westcott, Luke Weston, Charles Whittaker, Pablo Wilke Berenguer, Hugh Williams, Thomas Winkler, Stefan Winzeck. Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 2023 [ pdf ]
"Analog Iterative Machine (AIM): using light to solve quadratic optimization problems with mixed variables" George Mourgias-Alexandris, Hitesh Ballani, Natalia G Berloff, James H Clegg, Daniel Cletheroe, Christos Gkantsidis, Istvan Haller, Vassily Lyutsarev, Francesca Parmigiani, Lucinda Pickup, Antony Rowstron. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.12594, April 2023 [ pdf ]
"Could cloud storage be disrupted in the next decade?" Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Ioan
Stefanovici, Dushyanth Narayanan, Benn Thomsen, Ant Rowstron. 12th USENIX Workshop on Hot
Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage 20), July 2020 [ pdf ]
"Glass: A New Media for a New Era?" 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. HotStorage, July 2018. [ pdf ]
I try to select research projects 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). A company licensed some of our P2P work around Pastry and SplitStream (SOSP’03). BrachCache was inspired by Squirrel (PODC’02). 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) moved to Azure.
Short bio:
Since May 1999 I have been working at Microsoft Research in the UK, where today I am a Distinguished Engineer. My research interests are broad, covering the spectrum of systems, distributed systems, storage and networking. 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).