Tom Anderson, University of Washington: Towards a Highly Available Internet

Tom Anderson, University of Washington

Title: Towards a Highly Available Internet

Abstract:

Internet availability—the ability for any two nodes in the Internet to communicate—is essential to being able to use the Internet for delivery critical applications such as real-time health monitoring and response. Despite massive investment by ISPs worldwide, Internet availability remains poor, with literally hundreds of outages occurring daily, even in North America and Europe. I will present measurement data showing that we need to address both short-term BGP convergence effects and longer-term outages that take on the order of hours to fix today. This talk will focus on long-term outages, those currently handled with human intervention.   I will describe some recent progress towards building an automated system to quickly localize and repair these long-term outages.
Biography:
Thomas Anderson is the Robert E. Dinning Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests span all aspects of building practical, robust, and efficient computer systems, including distributed systems, operating systems, computer networks, multiprocessors, and security. He is an ACM Fellow, winner of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, winner of the IEEE Bennett Prize, past program chair of SIGCOMM and SOSP, and he has co-authored seventeen award papers. More information about his research is available on his web page at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom.