Philip Brighten Godfrey | |
Ph.D., Computer Science, UC Berkeley, May 2009.
Office: 3211 Siebel Center I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I completed my Ph.D. in May 2009, advised by Ion Stoica at UC Berkeley (which means this is something of a coincidence). From February to July 2009, I was a visiting researcher at Intel Labs Berkeley. I am seeking strong graduate students to work on challenging problems in building, analyzing, and understanding networks and systems. If you are interested in working with me or applying to Illinois, please read this. |
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Teaching
- Fall 2012: CS 538: Advanced Computer Networks
- Spring 2012: CS 241: System Programming
- Fall 2011: CS 538: Advanced Computer Networks
- Spring 2011: CS 438: Communication Networks
- Fall 2010: CS 598: Advanced Computer Networks
- Spring 2010: CS 241: System Programming
- Spring 2010: CS 591: Foundations of Systems and Networking
- Fall 2009: CS 598: Advanced Internet
Research
My research integrates networked systems and theory. You can check out my complete list of papers. Here are my group's current themes.
Low latency networking
- More is Less: Reducing Latency via Redundancy [HotNets 2012]
- Finishing Flows Quickly with Preemptive Scheduling [SIGCOMM 2012]
- ASAP: A Low-Latency Transport Layer [CoNEXT 2011]
Reduces the latency of DNS and TCP connection establishment; recently awarded a grant from VeriSign's Internet Infrastructure Grant Program.
Even a simple task like retrieving a small web object currently takes many times longer than the underlying network latency. How can we design the Internet's protocols to approach speed-of-light responsiveness?
Trustworthy networking
- VeriFlow: Verifying Network-Wide Invariants in Real Time [NSDI 2013, HotSDN 2012]
Verifies a network's correctness and security invariants with millisecond-level latency as each forwarding rule is modified by the SDN controller. - Debugging the Data Plane with Anteater [SIGCOMM 2011]
By checking a network's actual behavior in the data plane, Anteater can catch errors that would be difficult to reveal with other tools. Anteater successfully found real-world bugs in a large campus network. - Ensuring Connectivity via Data Plane Mechanisms [NSDI 2013]
Data center network topology
- Jellyfish: Networking Data Centers Randomly [NSDI 2012, HotCloud 2011]
A random graph topology simplifies incremental expansion and modification, and has higher bandwidth than a comparable fat-tree.
Compact routing and paths in social networks
- Distance Oracles for Stretch Less Than 2 [SODA 2013]
- Shortest Paths in Less Than a Millisecond [WOSN 2012]
Even in giant social networks, their structure enables this algorithm, after some pre-processing, to find exact point-to-point shortest paths in less than a millisecond. - Compact routing in sparse graphs [INFOCOM 2011]
Improves the latency/space tradeoff of routing protocols in the realistic case of sparse graphs, introducing a tradeoff with computation time. Compactly finds exact shortest paths more than 99% of the time in an Internet topology. - Scalable routing on flat names [CoNEXT 2010]
Guarantees delivery of packets within close to the lowest possible latency, given only an arbitrary location-independent name like a DNS name.
Flexible Internet architecture
- Architecting for Innovation [CCR July 2011]
How can we design an Internet architecture to accomodate evolution and diversity of protocols? - Slick Packets [SIGMETRICS 2011]
The flexibility of source-controlled routing combined with fast re-routing in the network in case of failures. - Pathlet Routing [SIGCOMM 2009]
An Internet routing architecture designed for flexibility, essentially source-controlled routing over a (policy-compliant) virtual topology. Routing flexibility can lead to benefits in reliability, performance, traffic engineering, and security. Also check out our demo at GEC9.
Complete list of papers
Students
Ph.D.
- Rachit Agarwal (co-advised with Matt Caesar)
- Mo Dong
- Chi-Yao Hong (co-advised with Matt Caesar)
- Qingxi Li
- Ankit Singla
- Ashish Vulimiri (co-advised with Gul Agha)
Undergraduate researchers
- Xuan Zou
- Sri Varsha Gorge
Past group members
- Sam Mussmann, M.S. December 2012, now at Google
- Oliver Michel, undergraduate researcher (2011-2012)
News
Professional activities
- CoNEXT 2013 Workshop Co-Chair
- HotSDN 2013 program committee
- ANCS 2013 program committee
- WWW 2013 program committee, Social Network and Graph Analysis track
- DIMACS Workshop on Software Defined Networking 2012 co-organizer
- HOTNETS 2011 program committee
- SIGMETRICS 2011 program committee
- CoNEXT 2010 Student Workshop co-chair
- IFIP Networking 2010 program committee
Random
- Short biography
- Headshot
- You Infinite Snake: blog
- Outreach activities
- Presidential Electability Predictor
- Repository of Availability Traces
Traces from measurement studies of PlanetLab, web sites, corporate PCs, Skype superpeers, and DNS servers packaged in a single compact format. - Aggregate CS conference statistics
- Mindy: A Minimalist "Development Environment"
- Conference deadlines: networks, theory
- Great talks on education: Clifford Stoll, Ken Robinson
