Computer Science Project

Sean Quinlan

***

Mountain Ave

Murray

HillNJ, *7974

(908)

***-****

*****@****-****.***

EducationStanfordUniversity

Ph.D. Computer Science, 1994.

University of Sydney, Australia

B.Sc. (Honors), Computer Science, 1988.

EmploymentBell Laboratories, Lucent

Technologies

1995-present: Member of technical staff. Much my of time is spent working on the Plan 9 distributed

operating system. Plan 9 is the work of many individuals; my contributions have

been in the areas of storage, security, networking, embedded systems, and the

interaction with Microsoft Windows.

Computer Science Robotics Laboratory, StanfordUniversity

1989-94: Research assistant. In addition to my dissertation

research, I implemented the multi-processor real-time operating system used in

the lab, designed a structured light sensor and various I/O boards, and was

involved in other project such as: path planning, dynamic simulation of rigid

bodies, and force feedback robotic manipulators.

AT&T Bell Laboratories

Summer 1989: Consultant. I built a prototype of the Plan 9

file system; incorporating daily snapshots stored to write-once optical

storage.

Selected Research Projects

Venti: a network

storage system intended for archival data. In this system, a

unique hash of a block's contents acts as the block identifier for read and

write operations. This approach leads to a number of interesting

properties: blocks cannot be overwritten thus preventing accidental or

malicious destruction of data, duplicate copies of a block can be coalesced

reducing the consumption of storage, and both clients and servers can detect

data corruption. Venti is a building block for constructing a variety of

archival storage applications such as logical backup, physical backup, and snapshot file systems.

Viaduct: virtual private

networking made easy. In this project, I designed and built a small, low cost

hardware device, called a minibrick, that is placed

between one or more home computers and a broadband Internet connection. The

Viaduct minibrick transparently and securely connects

these computers to the user s corporate network. The architecture of this

system is a physically distributed Ethernet switch, simplifying configuration

and administration compared to the more typical IP layer VPNs.

This project also developed and patented a novel approach to compression for

unreliable packet networks.

Ph.D. Dissertation: The real-time modification of collision-free

paths for robots. This research attempts to close the gap between global path

planning and real-time sensor-based robot control. Contributions include: a

method for re-planning in dynamic environments, an efficient algorithm for

computing the distance between non-convex objects, and a real-time method for

calculating a discrete approximation to the time-optimal parameterization of a

path. Supervised by Oussama Khatib.

Cache Worm File

System: This project explored the design of a general purpose file system

for write-once read-many (WORM) storage. A magnetic disk cache enables blocks

to be modified multiple times before they are written to the WORM and increases

performance. Snapshots of the file system can be made at any time without

limiting the users' access to files. These snapshots reside entirely on the

WORM, are accessible to the user via a second read-only file system, do not

contain multiple copies of unchanged data, and can be used to rebuild the file

system in the event that the disk cache is destroyed.

Publications

R. Cox, E. Grosse, R. Pike, D. Presotto,

and S. Quinlan, Security in Plan 9, Usenix Security Symposium, 2002. Awarded best paper at the conference.

S. Quinlan and S. Dorward,

Venti: A New Approach to Archival Storage,

Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies,

2002. Awarded best

paper at the conference.

S. Quinlan, The Real-Time Modification of

Collision-Free Paths, Ph.D. Thesis, StanfordUniversity, 1994.

S. Quinlan, Efficient Distance Computation between

Non-Convex Objects, IEEE International

Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1994.

S. Quinlan and O. Khatib,

Elastic Bands: Connecting Path Planning and Control, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1993.

S. Quinlan and O. Khatib, Towards

Real-Time Execution of Motion Tasks, in

Experimental Robotics 2, ed. R. Chatila and G. Hirzinger, Springer-Verlag, 1993.

S. Quinlan, A Cached WORM File System, Software - Practice & Experience,

21(12), pp. 1289-1299, 1991.

Patents

6236341, 6388584: Method and apparatus for data compression

of network packets.

Honors

ARCS Fellowship, 1993.

National Science Foundation Fellowship, 1990-1993.

1st place, 1991 ACM International

Collegiate Programming Contest.

3rd place, 1990 ACM International

Collegiate Programming Contest.

University of Sydney Medal for Computer Science, 1988.

References

Ken Thompson

Fellow

Entrisphere, Inc.

***@***********.***

Rob Pike

Director of Computing Concepts Research

Bell Labs,

Lucent Technologies

***@****-****.***

Eric Grosse

Director of Networked Computing Research

Bell Labs,

Lucent Technologies

***@****-****.***

Oussama Khatib

Professor of Computer Science

StanfordUniversity

******@**.********.***

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