Nick McKeown
Encyclopedia
Nicholas William McKeown, better known as Nick McKeown, is an English-American expert in computer network
ing. His career includes both education and starting companies in Silicon Valley
.
, England
.
He received his bachelor's degree
from the University of Leeds
in 1986. From 1986 through 1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard
Labs, in their network and communications research group in Bristol, England
.
He moved to the United States in 1989 and earned both his master's degree in 1992 and PhD in 1995 from the University of California at Berkeley. During Spring 1995, he worked briefly for Cisco Systems
where he helped design their GSR 12000 router
.
His PhD thesis was on "Scheduling Cells in an Input-Queued Cell Switch", with advisor Professor Jean Walrand.
He joined the faculty of Stanford University
in 1995 as assistant professor of electrical engineering
and computer science
.
In 1997 McKeown co-founded Abrizio
Inc. with Anders Swahn, where he was CTO.
Abrizio was acquired by PMC-Sierra
in 1999 for stock shares worth $400 million.
He was promoted to associate professor in 2002.
He was co-founder in 2003 (with Sundar Iyer) and CEO of Nemo Systems
, which Cisco Systems bought for $12.5 million cash in 2005.
He became faculty director of the Clean Slate Program
in 2006, and was promoted to full professor in 2010.
(SDN) movement, which he helped start with Scott Shenker
and Martin Casado. SDN and OpenFlow arose from the PhD work of Casado at Stanford University, where he was a student of McKeown.
OpenFlow, a novel programmatic interface for controlling network switches, routers, Wi-Fi
APs, cellular base stations and WDM/TDM equipment. OpenFlow challenged the vertically integrated approach to switch and router design of the past twenty years.
In 2007, Casado, McKeown and Shenker co-founded Nicira Networks, a Palo Alto, California
based company working on network virtualization, but still in stealth mode
.
In 2011 McKeown and Shenker co-founded the Open Networking Foundation
(ONF) to transfer control of OpenFlow to a newly created not-for-profit organization.
(IEEE) Communications Society
Stephen O. Rice Prize for the best paper in communications theory went to a paper on "Achieving 100% Throughput in an Input-Queued Switch", which McKeown co-authored with his students Adisak Mekkittikul
, Venkat Anantharam and Jean Walrand.
The paper discussed dealing with the problem of head-of-line blocking
using Virtual Output Queues
.
McKeown was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering
in 2011. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
(UK), a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM). In 2005 he was awarded the Lovelace Medal
from the British Computer Society
. he gave a lecture on "Internet Routers (Past Present and Future)". The citation described him as "the world's leading expert on router design." In 2009 he received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
. At Stanford he has been the STMicroelectronics
Faculty Scholar, the Robert Noyce Faculty Fellow, a Fellow of the Powell Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation
.
. In 2001 he co-funded the Death Penalty Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law
(known as Boalt Hall) in Berkeley, California
.
In 2009 he received the Abolition Award from Death Penalty Focus
.
Computer network
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
ing. His career includes both education and starting companies in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
.
Biography
Nick McKeown was born April 7, 1963 in BedfordBedford
Bedford is the county town of Bedfordshire, in the East of England. It is a large town and the administrative centre for the wider Borough of Bedford. According to the former Bedfordshire County Council's estimates, the town had a population of 79,190 in mid 2005, with 19,720 in the adjacent town...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.
He received his bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
from the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
in 1986. From 1986 through 1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
Labs, in their network and communications research group in Bristol, England
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
.
He moved to the United States in 1989 and earned both his master's degree in 1992 and PhD in 1995 from the University of California at Berkeley. During Spring 1995, he worked briefly for Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...
where he helped design their GSR 12000 router
Cisco 12000
The Cisco 12000, also known as a Gigabit Switch Router or GSR, is a series of large network routers designed and manufactured by Cisco Systems. It is marketed primarily to large service providers, as well as for use in some enterprise networks...
.
His PhD thesis was on "Scheduling Cells in an Input-Queued Cell Switch", with advisor Professor Jean Walrand.
He joined the faculty of Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 1995 as assistant professor of electrical engineering
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
and computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
.
In 1997 McKeown co-founded Abrizio
Abrizio
Abrizio was a fabless semiconductor company which made switching fabric chip sets . Their chip set, the TT1, was used by several large system development companies as the core switch fabric in their high value communication systems.-Founding:It was founded in 1997 by Professor Nick McKeown as a...
Inc. with Anders Swahn, where he was CTO.
Abrizio was acquired by PMC-Sierra
PMC-Sierra
PMC-Sierra is a fabless semiconductor company which develops and sells devices into the communications, storage, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.-Corporate history:...
in 1999 for stock shares worth $400 million.
He was promoted to associate professor in 2002.
He was co-founder in 2003 (with Sundar Iyer) and CEO of Nemo Systems
Nemo Systems
Nemo Systems was a developer of "network memory" based in the Silicon Valley area in California. It was acquired by Cisco Systems on October 14, 2005.-History:...
, which Cisco Systems bought for $12.5 million cash in 2005.
He became faculty director of the Clean Slate Program
Clean Slate Program
The Clean Slate Program is an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which aims to consider how the internet would be redesigned with a "Clean Slate"...
in 2006, and was promoted to full professor in 2010.
Research
McKeown is active in the Software Defined NetworkingSoftware Defined Networking
Software Defined Networking is a term coined by Kate Greene and refers to a network architecture in which the network control plane is decoupled from the physical topology. The rational for this approach is twofold. First, the decoupling allows for the control plane to be implemented using a...
(SDN) movement, which he helped start with Scott Shenker
Scott Shenker
Scott Shenker is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He is also the head of the Networking Group and the Vice President of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. He received his Sc.B. in Physics from Brown University in 1978, and his PhD in Physics from...
and Martin Casado. SDN and OpenFlow arose from the PhD work of Casado at Stanford University, where he was a student of McKeown.
OpenFlow, a novel programmatic interface for controlling network switches, routers, Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
APs, cellular base stations and WDM/TDM equipment. OpenFlow challenged the vertically integrated approach to switch and router design of the past twenty years.
In 2007, Casado, McKeown and Shenker co-founded Nicira Networks, a Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...
based company working on network virtualization, but still in stealth mode
Stealth mode
In business, stealth mode is a company's temporary state of secretiveness, usually undertaken in order to avoid alerting competitors to a pending product launch or other business initiative...
.
In 2011 McKeown and Shenker co-founded the Open Networking Foundation
Open Networking Foundation
The Open Networking Foundation is a nonprofit, mutually beneficial trade organization, founded by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo! to improve networking through software-defined networking.The standards-setting group was formed out of recognition that cloud...
(ONF) to transfer control of OpenFlow to a newly created not-for-profit organization.
Awards
In 2000, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...
(IEEE) Communications Society
IEEE Communications Society
The IEEE Communications Society is a professional society of the IEEE. It is also known by the abbreviation ComSoc. The Society focuses on two principal areas: the science of, and education about, communications engineering with the goal of advancing the state of the field; and professional...
Stephen O. Rice Prize for the best paper in communications theory went to a paper on "Achieving 100% Throughput in an Input-Queued Switch", which McKeown co-authored with his students Adisak Mekkittikul
Adisak Mekkittikul
Adisak Mekkittikul received his B.Eng. from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Thailand and M.S. in computer engineering from Wichita State University . He completed the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, CA...
, Venkat Anantharam and Jean Walrand.
The paper discussed dealing with the problem of head-of-line blocking
Head-of-line blocking
Head-of-line blocking is a performance-limiting phenomenon that occurs in buffered telecommunication network switches.-Description:...
using Virtual Output Queues
Virtual Output Queues
Virtual Output Queues are an input queuing strategy for use in telecommunications and computer network switches. It addresses a common problem known as Head-of-line blocking.-Description:...
.
McKeown was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
in 2011. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Royal Academy of Engineering
-Overview: is the UK’s national academy of engineering. The Academy brings together the most successful and talented engineers from across the engineering sectors for a shared purpose: to advance and promote excellence in engineering....
(UK), a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
(ACM). In 2005 he was awarded the Lovelace Medal
Lovelace Medal
The Lovelace Medal, established by the British Computer Society in 1998, is presented to individuals who have advanced Information Systems or added significantly to their understanding....
from the British Computer Society
British Computer Society
The British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally...
. he gave a lecture on "Internet Routers (Past Present and Future)". The citation described him as "the world's leading expert on router design." In 2009 he received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
The IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award is a Technical Field Award of the IEEE established in 1986. This award has been presented annually since 1988 for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications....
. At Stanford he has been the STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics is an Italian-French electronics and semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.While STMicroelectronics corporate headquarters and the headquarters for EMEA region are based in Geneva, the holding company, STMicroelectronics N.V. is registered in Amsterdam,...
Faculty Scholar, the Robert Noyce Faculty Fellow, a Fellow of the Powell Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
.
Opposition to the death penalty
McKeown is involved in the movement to abolish the death penaltyCapital punishment in the United States
Capital punishment in the United States, in practice, applies only for aggravated murder and more rarely for felony murder. Capital punishment was a penalty at common law, for many felonies, and was enforced in all of the American colonies prior to the Declaration of Independence...
. In 2001 he co-funded the Death Penalty Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, commonly referred to as Berkeley Law and Boalt Hall, is one of 14 schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley Law is consistently regarded as an elite and prestigious law school...
(known as Boalt Hall) in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
.
In 2009 he received the Abolition Award from Death Penalty Focus
Death Penalty Focus
Founded in 1988, Death Penalty Focus is a non-profit organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment through grassroots organizing, research, and the dissemination of information about the death penalty and its alternatives....
.