[Colloq] Hiring Talk **Friday, March 4, 2003** 149 CN

[Rachel Bates]

TITLE:  Content delivery: Practice and principles

SPEAKER:  Ravi Sundaram
          Research Scientist
          MIT & Akamai Technologies

TIME:  10:30 AM, Friday, April 4 2003

LOCATION: CN 149

ABSTRACT:

In the short span of 5 years content delivery networks have established
themselves as an integral part of the Internet infrastructure. Akamai, the
world's largest content delivery network has deployed over 13,000 servers
on 1,000 networks at 1,500 locations around the world. These servers
deliver html documents, static images, and streaming media for over 1,300
of the most popular content providers on the web. Over the years Akamai's
systems have had to contend with staggering growth as well as events
ranging from network partitions to denial of service attacks. Our
experience has been that solid engineering backed by sound principles and
efficient algorithms is critical for scalable and robust systems.

In this talk we consider the problem of mapping - directing browsers to
servers - which is central to content delivery networks.  We present a
study of mapping from an engineering and experiential standpoint. We
explore specifically the issues involved in directing traffic to website
mirrors. Using topology discovery, clustering, congestion measurement and
load-balancing algorithms we show how FirstPoint, Akamai's DNS-based
application-level anycast service, has measurably improved the performance
of many leading websites.

BIO:

Ravi Sundaram was a Director of Engineering and the head of the Mapping
group at Akamai from 1999 to 2001. In this role he designed and built
Akamai's core infrastructure for directing browsers to servers. His
research led to the creation of a number of new services that are in use
by companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo!. In an earlier life he used to
be a bond trader at a leading hedge fund. Ravi has a BTech from
the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Madras) and a PhD from MIT.

Host: Rajmohan Rajaraman