[UCI-Calit2] Engineering a Large Self-Managed Network

[Anna Lynn Spitzer]

Networked Systems Seminar Series presents: Lessons in Engineering a
Large Self-Managed Network

With Bruce Maggs, Akamai Technologies and Carnegie Mellon University

2-3 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008
Refreshments served at 1:45 p.m.

Calit2 Building, Room 3008


This talk describes some of the engineering challenges encountered in
the design, implementation and operation of the world's largest
content-delivery network. The talk begins with an overview of the
services that Akamai provides its customers, and explains the underlying
distributed systems architectures that deliver those services.  It then
examines the difficulties posed by hardware, software and network
failures, and presents approaches to mitigating them.  Finally, the talk
addresses several perhaps less obvious sources of problems, including
configuration errors, customer and end-user misperceptions, and attacks.

Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer
science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986 and
1989, respectively. In 1994, he joined Carnegie Mellon, where he is now
a professor in the computer science department.  While on a two-year
leave-of-absence from Carnegie Mellon, Maggs helped to launch Akamai
Technologies, serving as its vice president for research and
development, before returning to Carnegie Mellon. He retains a part-time
role at Akamai as vice president for research.  Maggs is spending the
2007-08 academic year at Duke University. He has also held visiting
faculty positions at M.I.T. and Princeton University.

Maggs's research focuses on networks for parallel and distributed
computing systems.  In 1986, he became the first winner (with Charles
Leiserson) of the Daniel L. Slotnick Award for Most Original Paper at
the International Conference on Parallel Processing, and in 1994 he
received an NSF National Young Investigator Award. He was co-chair of
the 1993-94 DIMACS Special Year on Massively Parallel Computation. Maggs
serves on the ACM Council as a member-at-large, and has served on the
steering committees for the ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and
Architectures (SPAA) and the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC).

For more information, contact Athina Markopoulou, (949) 824-1637.