George Varghese

For the Indian film director, seeGeorge Varghese (director).

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George Varghese (born 1960) is a computer scientist, a professor of computer science and Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Networking in theUCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is the author of the textbookNetwork Algorithmics, published byMorgan Kaufmann^[1] in 2004.

Education and career

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Varghese received his B.Tech inelectrical engineering fromIIT Bombay in 1981, his M.S. in computer studies fromNCSU in 1983 and his Ph.D. incomputer science fromMIT in 1993, where his advisor wasNancy Lynch.^[2] He has been a Fellow of theACM since 2002.^[3]

Varghese was a professor atWashington University in St. Louis from 1992 until 1999, when he moved to theUniversity of California, San Diego. He worked atMicrosoft Research from 2012 until 2016, and took his present position at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016.^[4]

Research

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Transparent Bridge Architecture

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Before his Ph.D., George spent several years as part of the network architecture and advanced development group atDigital Equipment Corporation, where he wrote the first specification for the first transparent bridge architecture (based on the inventions of Mark Kempf and Radia Perlman).^{[citation needed]} After several iterations and other authors, this became the IEEE 802 bridge specification, a widely implemented standard that is the basis of the billion dollar transparent bridging industry{{According to whom}}.^{[citation needed]} He was also part of the DEC team that invented the Gigaswitch and the Giganet (a precursor toGigabit Ethernet).^{[citation needed]}

Network Algorithmics

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Varghese is known for helping define network algorithmics, a field of study which resolves networking bottlenecks using interdisciplinary techniques that include changes to hardware and operating systems as well as efficient algorithms.^{[citation needed]}

His contributions to network algorithmics includeDeficit Round Robin (co-invented with M. Shreedhar), a scheduling algorithm that is widely used in routers, and timing wheels (with Tony Lauck), an algorithm for fast timers that is used as the basis of fast timers in Linux and FreeBSD.^{[citation needed]}

IP lookup and packet classification

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Varghese has also worked extensively on fast IP lookup and packet classification. His work with G. Chandranmenon on Threaded indexes predates the work done atCisco Systems andJuniper Networks ontag switching^{[citation needed]}. His work on multibit tries (with V. Srinivasan) has been used by a number of companies including Microsoft. His work on scalable IP packet lookup (with Waldvogel and Turner) for longer addresses such as IPv6 is being considered for use by Linux.^{[citation needed]}

George also worked with Eatherton and Dittia on the Tree bitmap IP lookup algorithm that is used in Cisco's CRS-1 router, which many^[who?] believe to be the fastest router in the world^{[citation needed]}. Tree bitmap and hypercuts (with Sumeet Singh and Florin Baboescu) appear to be among the best algorithms (excluding CAMs) for IP lookup and packet classification today.^{[citation needed]}

Self stabilization

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George is also known for his contributions to the theoretical field ofself-stabilization (a form of fault-tolerance), where he has helped (with various colleagues) pioneer several general techniques such as local checking, local correction, and counter flushing.^{[citation needed]}

NetSift

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Varghese co-founded NetSift Inc. (with Sumeet Singh) in 2004, serving as president and CTO. NetSift helped pioneer the notion of automated signature extraction for security and helped to introduce the use of streaming algorithms for network measurement and security at speeds greater than 10 Gbit/s. His work with Cristian Estan on multistage filters has been widely used in industry. NetSift was acquired in June 2005 by Cisco Systems as part of the Modular Switching Group.^{[citation needed]}

Awards and honors

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Elected as a member into theNational Academy of Engineering, 2017^[5]
2014 Koji Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communications for "Contributions to the field of network algorithmics and its applications to high-speed packet networks"
ACM Fellow, 2002
Best Teacher Award in Computer Science, UCSD, 2001, voted by graduating undergraduate students
Best Tutorial Award, SIGMETRICS 98.
Big Fish, Mentor of the Year Award, Association for Graduate Engineering Students (AGES), Washington University 1997.
ONR Young Investigator Award 1996 (34 awarded out of 416 applications across the sciences, among 2 computer scientists chosen in 1996)
Best Student Paper, PODC 96, for a paper jointly written with student Mahesh Jayaram.
Joint winner of the Sproull Prize for best MIT Thesis in Computer Science (1993) and nominated by MIT for ACM Thesis Prize.
DEC Graduate Education Program (GEEP) Scholar, 1989–1991.

Selected publications

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Sumeet Singh, Cristian Estan, George Varghese, and Stefan Savage,Automated Worm Fingerprinting, Proceedings of the 6th ACM/USENIXSymposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). This paper was the basis of NetSift, which see above.
Cristian Estan, David Moore, and George Varghese,Building a Better NetFlow, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Portland, OR, September 2004
Fan Chung Graham, Ron Graham, and George Varghese,Parallelism versus Memory Allocation in Pipelined Router Forwarding Engines
Proceedings of SPAA 2004 (invited and accepted to Theory of Computer Science journal as best of SPAA), Barcelona, Spain March 2004
W. Eatherton, Z. Dittia, and George Varghese,Tree bitmap: Hardware Software IP Lookups with Incremental Updates (no prior conference paper, IP lookup algorithm used in Cisco's most recent CRS-1 router) ACM Computer Communications Review, volume 34, April 2004
George Varghese,Summary of Ph.D. Thesis on Self-stabilization