About the Talk:
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.
[ Slides]
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About the Speaker:
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. His
advisor was Charles Leiserson. 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 2007-2008
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 1993-1994 DIMACS Special Year on Massively Parallel Computation. Maggs serves on
the ACM Council as a Member-at-Large, and and has served on the steering committees for
the ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) and ACM Internet
Measurement Conference (IMC).
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