Paul V. Mockapetris wins 2005 ACM SIGCOMM Award

Paul V. Mockapetris, Chairman and Chief Scientist at Nominum Inc., is the winner of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM Award.

The SIGCOMM Award is widely recognized as the highest honor in computer networking. The Award recognizes lifetime achievement in and contributions to the field. It is awarded annually to a person whose work, over the course of his or her career, represents a significant contribution to the field and a substantial influence on the work and perceptions of others in the field.

The SIGCOMM Award is presented to Dr. Mockapetris "in recognition of his foundational work in designing, developing and deploying the Domain Name System, and his sustained leadership in overall Internet architecture development."

Paul Mockapetris created the original DNS protocol, wrote its first implementation, and worked with others to spread the DNS across the Internet. The design of DNS, which was the first major datagram protocol of the Internet, established a number of principles for key Internet infrastructural services. Its simplicity of design and fitness for purpose have stood the test of time. The strength of its design lies in a novel combination of hierarchy and caching that gives each organization absolute control over part of the namespace while simultaneously relying on caching to make the entire system efficient. Its success can be seen from the fact that DNS now handles many orders of magnitude more names and traffic than when it was first deployed, and yet the design and structure have remained intact. As a result the DNS design and caching mechanisms are often cited as two of the cornerstones on which the success of the Internet is built.

In addition to his work on DNS, Dr. Mockapetris' career has included pioneering work on multiprocessor operating systems, virtual machines, and ring LAN technology. Further, Dr. Mockapetris played an important role in the deployment of networking technologies internationally. Starting during 1990-1993 as a program manager at ARPA, Dr. Mockapetris fostered the international deployment of multimedia conferencing, multicast, and QoS. His strong leadership in development of Internet architecture continued as Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force during 1994-1996, as member of the Internet Architecture Board during 1994-1996, and then as member of the Federal Networking Council.

Dr. Mockapetris is a recipient of the IEEE Internet Award and is an ACM Fellow.

In summary, through his sustained effort in support of the Internet architecture, beginning with DNS and continuing through work at ARPA, IETF, and industry, Dr. Mockapetris has made far-reaching and influential contributions to computer networking. The 2005 SIGCOMM award recognizes Dr. Mockapetris for this lifetime record of achievement.

Keynote speech: The Internet and Identifiers

One factor driving growth in the Internet is an increase in the number of objects involved in the Internet, whether "real" objects in the physical world such as RFID tags, toasters with IP addresses, or "virtual" objects such as phone numbers, email addresses, or web pages. A second factor is the growth in bandwidth due to fiber optics, new wireless technologies, and the like. The "push" effect of more objects and the "pull" effect of more capability creates powerful reinforcement. Since the first step in any network activity is identifying the parties to the activity, there's a corresponding need for more and better technologies for creating identifiers, as well as technologies for search, management, etc.

We rely on a variety of techniques, services, and layers of identity in today's Internet. But we need to be certain that today's services can scale and that we learn from past efforts such as ENUM, and develop effective methodologies for future problems. This talk takes a look at the technologies in use, their interdependencies, and some outstanding issues