Ant Rowstron,
Ex-Distinguished Engineer/Deputy Lab Director at Microsoft Research

Email: rowstron@hotmail.com

My full publication list (and on Google Scholar)

I will be announcing my new role soon!

I have spent much of my career as a systems researcher, working at the intersection of Storage, Networking, and Distributed Systems. My degree and DPhil were in Computer Science fields, but in the last decade I have also learnt about optics, physics, robotics and other disciplines (although I led the UK robot football team for RoboCup 1998!). During my early career I was fortunate enough to do early work on structured overlays or Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) when I worked with Peter Druschel in the early 2000s on one of the original DHTs, called Pastry (awarded the 10 year test of time award in 2011) and on the first highly distributed key-value store (PAST 2001).

I was very honoured to be awarded in 2016 the prestigious ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award. In 2021 I was awarded the ACM EuroSys Lifetime Achievement Award . I was elected as a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020.

My last papers published while at Microsoft Research:

Latest papers:

Career at Microsoft Research from May 1999 to June 2025 - from 2020 as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer

From May 1999 until 1st June 2025 I was at Microsoft Research Cambridge and for the last ~5 years I was a Distinguished Engineer. Since around 2010 I led a small team initially focused on traditional computer systems and networking.

Building a multi-disciplinary team: Optics for the Cloud (2015 - 2022)

In around 2015 I pivoted the team to focus on projects creating and exploring new optical-based technologies for the cloud across storage, networking and compute - under the banner of "Optics for the Cloud". This pivot began the creation of a (Microsoft and industry) unique and highly multi-disciplinary team able to work across the full stack from materials -> components -> devices -> systems and the software stacks running on them. Examples of the types of projects the lab has worked on include Project Silica, which explored storing data in glass as a replacement for tape in long-term archival storage. Another public project was our work on optical computers, initially through AIM which focussed on optimization, and then into Analog Optical Computer. Mark Russinovich, the Azure CTO, spoke about it publicly in May 2025:



Optics for the cloud also had some really interesting optical networking projects, and one is a new (highly disruptive) networking technology which is not yet public, but will be soon!

I grew the team to around 70 people, and about 5 major projects at any time which all needed significant lab space (and we were running out of meeting rooms to convert!), and this resulted in Microsoft creating a second building for Microsoft Research in Cambridge which opened in September 2022 in 198 Cambridge Science Park. 198 has a set of state of the art labs across three floors to support all the hardware work my team was doing. It was (is) an amazing place!

Expanding: future cloud infrastructure (2022 onward)

In 2022 I expanded the scope of the work that the team did to look more broadly at hardware technologies and the co-design of hardware and software to support the cloud. The team started to look at robotics, focussing in on the robotics needed to support data centers and future AI infrastructure - with the goal of creating the robotic data centers that can self-maintain - see here. Early work has resulted in novel highly dexterous robotics focussed on the complex task of networking cable and transceiver management for the data center, where multiple robots collaborate to achieve the tasks.



Most recently this also involved looking at innovative technologies focussed on future AI inference infrastructure and how to make it more efficient from the Silicon up. As part of this, the team defined a new class of memory called "Managed Retention Memory" (MRM) designed to support AI memory workloads. An exciting space.

Here are some recent papers on these newer areas:

Also in 2022 (named in honour of COP27 in Egypt) we also started Egypt a project looking to use the teams skills in technologies used for the data center to create small low-cost sensors for methane monitoring which are essential to help with measuring and controlling global warming.

Project Silica images and videos:

Here are some images of data being stored in glass starting in 2017 and the last one is taken in 2019. To learn more look at these YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzHsibqpIs https://youtu.be/-rfEYd4NGQg https://youtu.be/3RKpA1OiEFE https://youtu.be/V7L_wdEuQXs https://youtu.be/xnK-uB4OsgU.



And here are some videos of the Silica Robotic Library (using different generations of shuttles!):



And two videos that Microsoft created about Silica for a general audience - one was in an amazing glass box in the middle of garden(!):




Short bio:

I spent from May 1999 until June 2025 working at Microsoft Research in the UK, where I was a Distinguished Engineer. My research interests are broad, covering the spectrum of systems, distributed systems, storage and networking and many other disciplines. 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 the University of Cambridge in November 1996, initially as a Research Associate in the Computer Laboratory and then as a Senior Research Associate in the Engineering Department. During this time, I was a consultant for the Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) (which became AT&T Research Cambridge in 1998).

Sites: GitHub | Azure