Ted Anderson's Home Page

About Me

I work for IBM Corporation's Almaden Research Center from Vashon, WA. For contacting me email is best. I am working on file systems, lately improving filesets and snapshots in GPFS. I've been working on GPFS since 2005. 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.

Links to Historic Documents

Before moving to Pittsburgh to work on AFS, I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the S-1 project. Mark Smotherman has put together an excellent history of the S-1 Supercomputer. Mark's page had many excellent references to documents from this project. Here are some others from that era:

(not) Weblog and PageRank

Adding content to the web is an important contribution that everyone can make to universal knowledge. More specifically, I want to return the favor that Google does me by being such a great search engine. In large part it does this using PageRank, which considers how frequently a page is a link target. But how will this work unless people create links to pages they like? Maintaining a weblog seems to be beyond me, so perhaps a simpler and more likely to succeed approach is a tagged and annotated bookmark system. I am using del.icio.us and hope to add a bookmark there with some tags and a sentence or two about every web page I like that I take the time to read. Here's a copy that will allow Google to index it (see del.icio.us's robots.txt; thanks to Boaz Shmueli for pointing this out). Also, here is my weblog, though I don't update it anymore.

It was brought to my attention, however, that the robots exclusion at del.icio.us is such that the bookmarks there do not contribute to the PageRank of the targets. Thus, my copy of my del.icio.us bookmarks will have to suffice for now.

Interests

Miscellaneous

Very miscellaneous links of interest.

  1. Much of the work I did at Livermore (LLNL) between 1979 and 1988 involved implementation of the Amber OS, which is documented in Charles Frankston's thesis.
  2. Random stuff not on my home page.
  3. DEC SRC Technical Reports top level.
  4. Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
  5. An old paper from 1992 by Jim Bowery on a Net Asset Tax makes interesting reading.
  6. The Chicago Board of Trade is now online. Especially interesting are the Catastrophy Insurance Options.
  7. Some pithy comments on the politics of [software] architecture from Bruce F. Webster's book on the Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development.
  8. A copy of the MojoNation Technical Overview, which appears to be gone from the net.
  9. An earlier version of the above IBMSJ paper appeared at GGF8 titled Grid Namespace for Files.
  10. Patent 6836775 Method, apparatus and computer program product for file system referrals issued December 28, 2004.
  11. Patent 6931410 Method, apparatus, and program for separate representations of file system locations from referring file systems issued August 16, 2005.
  12. Patent 6947940 Uniform name space referrals with location independence issued September 20, 2005.
  13. Patent 7685128 Remote access agent for caching in a SAN file system issued March 23rd, 2010.
  14. Patent 8156164 Concurrent directory update in a cluster file system issued April 10th, 2012.
  15. A copy of "Architecture Machinations" Vol III, No 14, April 12, 1977 that I thought was interesting because there are references "How to give your 7/32 the Perception of a Dog" by Paul Heckbert on the net.
  16. The Galileo Project; Galileo Galilei at Rice University.

Quotes

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)

Bougainvillea

Places of Interest

This is my PGP public key. Here are the particulars: 

    KeyID: 1F4B4907, UserID: Ted Anderson <ota@polyonymo.us>
    Fingerprint: D347 B1D9 1C71 A209 39A5  0625 8CAC 50BC 1F4B 4907
Ted Anderson, .
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