Almaden Institute

Global Internet Content Delivery Abstract: This talk describes some of the challenges in managing the world’s largest content delivery network. Akamai 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 content providers, including many of the most popular sites on the web. While the content delivery network is autonomic in some respects—without self-management and self-healing it would be difficult to keep a system of this scale afloat—other maintenance functions still require human expertise. The talk suggests several research problems whose solution would make the design, deployment, and operation of huge distributed applications less difficult.  Bruce Maggs - Bio Bruce Maggs: Vice President, Research, Akamai Technologies Associate Professor, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University bmm@cs.cmu.edu Bruce Maggs received S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. After spending one year as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, he worked as a Research Scientist at NEC Research Institute in Princeton from 1990 to 1993. In 1994, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he is now an Associate 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.