Research I work for IBM Corporation's Almaden Research Center from
St. Thomas, VI. My phone number here is 877-760-0037 (faxes too; outside the
US), however, email to <ota at us dot ibm dot com> is best. I
am working on file systems, lately helping add filesets to GPFS.
Earlier I worked on the Distributed
Storage Tank project and on Global Namespaces. I was a co-author on
a paper in the IBM
Systems Journal titled
Global
namespace for files
. I am also interested in namespace work in
Grid and NFSv4
protocols.
Previously I worked at the IBM Pittsburgh Lab, formerly known as Transarc Corporation. Much of the time at Transarc I was working on Episode, the DFS Server's file system. The Winter 1992 Usenix conference contained a fairly comprehensive description of Episode. I am also a co-author of an early paper on DFS, then called DEcorum. Here are some press releases announcing the formation of Transarc Corporation.
Before that I worked on AFS®, specifically the kaserver which implements the Kerberos 4 authentication protocol and an encyption algorithm called FCrypt. The goal of the FCrypt design was to provide a faster, smaller alternative to DES for use in the kernel. In retrospect this, was a mistake; amateur cryptographers should not design new ciphers for production systems. It is much harder to do a good job than it first appears. AFS is now available as open source and is supported by a vigorous development community. I occasionally contribute to the AFSLore Wiki, and I've become a pretty big fan of Wikis generally.
Before moving to Pittsburgh to work on AFS, I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the S-1 project.
My vision is to create a system for distributing file data that uses market forces to optimize resource usage, peer-to-peer distribution, cryptography to control privacy and authenicity, and erasure codes to provide reliability. The MojoNation system was an attempt to build something like this. OceanStore is ambitious project in a similar vein, and there are others, too numerous to mention here. Complex adaptive systems are another large and interesting topic; distributed file systems are just one possible application. A great reference is "The Ecology of Computation", Huberman, Bernardo A., editor, ISBN 0-44-470375-6. Several chapters on applying market forces to computational systems are especially insightful.
Cryptography is the third most important ingredient for the information society, after the computers and networks themselves. Will quantum computing make existing cryptography obsolete?
While the changes wrought by the information revolution will seem earth shattering, hard on its heels will be the nanotechnology revolution, which truly will be earth shattering. Nanotechnology was started by Eric Drexler. The Foresight Institute tries to track and promote its development.
A tour de force technical analysis, which I still have not finished reading, is K. Eric Drexler, "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation"
Considering all the powerful technological forces at work in our lives, where are we ultimately headed? What does we even mean? What about the technological singularity? The Extropians and Transhumanists consider these issues.
Development of space and moving civilization off the planet, into the
solar system and then colonizing the rest of the galaxy is a necessity.
Marshall Savage describes one approach in The
Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
.
Given developments in computers, networks, and nanotechnology, the
optimal techniques for moving into space are uncertain. Clearly, the
technology used by NASA is, at best, a stopgap measure.
Very miscellaneous links of interest.
Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development.
Grid Namespace for Files.
I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.
-- Mahatma Gandhi, Source: Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India, August 11, 1920, from: Fischer, Louis ed., The Essential Gandhi, 1962, pp. 156-57. Via: Lucky Green's <shamrock at netcom dot com> .sig of 31-Jan-97
What we seek is not the overthrow of the government but a situation in which it gets lost in the shuffle.
-- Duncan Frissell <frissell at panix dot com>, Cypherpunks 29-Aug-96
Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It wafts across the electrified borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it were lace.
-- Ronald Reagan (speaking before the Institut de France on June 15, 1989)
