A First Look at a Commercial Hybrid Content Delivery System

  • Bruce Maggs | Duke University

This talk describes a commercial hybrid content delivery service, Akamai’s Download Manager (DLM). The DLM extends Akamai’s fixed-infrastructure network of edge servers by employing peer-to-peer elements. The DLM currently includes tens of millions of peers in over 230 countries. Using a one-month trace from the production system, we study the characteristics of the peer population, the mobility of peers between different networks and locations, the pattern of download activity, and the performance of peer-assisted versus fixed-infrastructure downloads.

Joint work with Ming-Chen Zhao, Paarijat Aditya, Yin Lin, Andreas Harberlen, Peter Druschel, and William Wishon.

Speaker Details

Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. His advisor was Charles Leiserson. 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 stayed until joining Duke University in 2009 as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. 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. Maggs’s research focuses on networks for parallel and distributed computing systems. In 1986, he became the first winner (with Charles Leiserson) of the Daniel L. Slotnick Award for Most Original Paper at the International Conference on Parallel Processing, and in 1994 he received an NSF National Young Investigator Award. He was co-chair of the 1993-1994 DIMACS Special Year on Massively Parallel Computation and has served on the steering committees for the ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), and on the program committees of numerous ACM conferences including STOC, SODA, PODC, NSDI, and SIGCOMM.

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