Philip Brighten Godfrey

Ph.D., Computer Science, UC Berkeley, May 2009.
M.S., UC Berkeley, 2006.
B.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, May 2002.

Office: 3211 Siebel Center
Email: pbg at illinois dot edu
Fax: 217-244-6869

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.

Teaching

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: CS598: Advanced Internet

Research

My research spans and integrates networked systems and theory. You can check out my complete list of papers. Here are some current themes.

Networking at the speed of light

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?

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.

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.

Trustworthy networking

VeriFlow: Verifying Network-Wide Invariants in Real Time [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 was successfully applied in a large campus network.

Data center networks

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 topology.

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, it's 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.

M.S.

Sam Mussmann

News

2012	May	Ahmed Khurshid and Wenxuan Zhou's paper in HotSDN 2012: VeriFlow: Verifying Network-Wide Invariants in Real Time
	April	Chi-Yao Hong's paper in SIGCOMM 2012: Finishing Flows Quickly with Preemptive Scheduling
		Shortest Paths in Less Than a Millisecond in WOSN 2012
		On the Resilience of Routing Tables brief announcement in PODC 2012
		Rachit Agarwal wins Rambus Computer Engineering Fellowship
	Mar	Chi-Yao Hong wins Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship
	Feb	How well can congestion pricing neutralize denial-of-service attacks? accepted to SIGMETRICS 2012
	Jan	NSF CAREER Award
2011	Dec	Jellyfish accepted to NSDI 2012
		IEEE Communications Society Data Storage Technical Committee 2010 Best Paper Award for Network Coding for Distributed Storage Systems
		Jellyfish presented at DIMACS Workshop on Systems and Networking Advances in Cloud Computing
	Oct	Panelist at Verisign Internet Infrastructure Grant Symposium ... grant program video, researcher video
	Sep	ASAP accepted to CoNEXT 2011
	Aug	BGP stability is precarious
	Jul	Architecting for Innovation accepted to CCR
	Apr	Debugging the Data Plane with Anteater accepted to SIGCOMM 2011
		Jellyfish: Networking Data Centers Randomly accepted to HotCloud 2011
	Mar	One of four winners of VeriSign's Internet Infrastructure Grant Program, for our work on ASAP, a low-latency transport protocol
	Jan	Slick Packets accepted to SIGMETRICS 2011
2010	Dec	Article on NSF grant on scalable, low latency networks
	Nov	Approximate Distance Queries and Compact Routing in Sparse Graphs accepted to INFOCOM 2011
		Demo at GEC9 on resilient source routing
	Sep	Scalable Routing on Flat Names accepted to CoNEXT 2010
	Aug	NSF grant awarded for network architecture experimentation on GENI
	Jul	NSF grant awarded for work on "Scaling Routing: From Theory to Practice (and Back Again)"

Professional activities

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
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