George Porter Assistant Research Scientist Center for Networked Systems University of California, San Diego Lecturer Revelle College University of California, San Diego Office EBU3B 3206 (Directions to my office are here) Email gmporter AT cs.ucsd.edu Mail University of California, San Diego George Porter, Computer Science & Engineering Dept 9500 Gilman Dr. #0404 La Jolla, CA 92093-0404 Voice 858.822.6818 Fax 858.534.7029

Research:

My research spans the areas of distributed systems, networking, and data-intensive computing. My research efforts broadly fall into i) improving datacenter networks to better support data-intensive applications, and ii) enabling developers to build, deploy, and operate applications that support significantly larger data sizes than is otherwise possible in a sustainable way (e.g., low cost and low energy requirements).

About me:

I am a member of the Center for Networked Systems as well as the Systems and Networking Group in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Before becoming a Research Scientist I was Amin Vahdat's post-doc. Previous to joining U.C. San Diego, I obtained my Ph.D. from the RAD Lab in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at U.C. Berkeley. My research advisor was Randy H. Katz. Before that I was an undergraduate in the Department of Computer Sciences at U.T. Austin, studying under J Strother Moore.

Publications: Link to publication page

CV: Link to CV

Students:

• Rishi Kapoor (Ph.D., in-progress, joint with Amin Vahdat)
• Changkun Chen, M.S. (graduated 6/2012)

News:

• 
• We've designed a scheduling approach for networks that support microsecond-scale circuit switching, which will appear at ACM HotNets'12.
• Our work on generalizing TritonSort to support general-purpose processing will appear at ACM SoCC'12. Also, our work on building very low-latency applications (such as Memcached) will also appear at Socc'12.
• Our work on adding general-purpose processing into the network fabric itself (NetBump) will appear at ANCS'12. Also, our work on building customizable middleboxes will appear at ANCS'12 too.
• Just got word that our work on building the TritonSort sorting system, and in particular a detailed energy measurement study of it setting the 2011 sort benchmark, will appear in ACM's TOCS journal.
• I'm a co-recipient of a 2012 Google Focused Research Award in Networking to support work on low-latency circuit switching in datacenters.
• I'm going to be a member of the NSDI'13 technical program committee.
• I've been selected to serve on the OSDI'12 External Review Committee.
• Our paper on the potential TDMA-based transport protocols in datacenter networks is going to appear at EuroSys'12 in Bern, Switzerland in April.
• Our paper on datacenter storage provisioning has recently appeared at USENIX FAST 2012.
• I'm going to be on the program committee for HotCloud'12.
• The TritonSort project won five new world records as part of the 2011 SortBenchmark.org GraySort competition! These include two new energy benchmarks (JouleSort), a MinuteSort, and two GraySort entries. More info is available at this CalIT2 press release, the original sortbenchmark.org site, and the TritonSort project page.

Current Projects:

• TritonSort: a balanced, efficient sorting data processing system.
• Helios: A Hybrid Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers.
• Various ongoing projects in low-latency datacenter networking.
• I lead the design and build-out of the UCSD SEED Cluster.
• I'm a coordinator for NSF's Center for Integrated Access Networks working group 1 (Datacenters).

Teaching:

• CSE 294: Systems and Networking Seminar (Spring 2011).

Fun fact: My Erdos number is 3 (Me → Scott Shenker → Foong Frances Yao → Paul Erdös) and my Bacon Number is 3, making my Erdos-Bacon number 6.