George Varghese, who was born in 1960, is a computer scientist and a professor of computer science. He holds the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Networking at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is the author of the textbook Network Algorithmics, which was published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2004.

Education and career

Varghese earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 1981, his master's degree in computer studies from NCSU in 1983, and his doctoral degree in computer science from MIT in 1993. His doctoral advisor was Nancy Lynch. He has been a Fellow of the ACM since 2002.

From 1992 to 1999, he was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1999, he moved to the University of California, San Diego. He worked at Microsoft Research from 2012 to 2016 and began his current position at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016.

Research

Before earning his Ph.D., George worked for several years at Digital Equipment Corporation in a group that designed network systems and advanced technologies. There, he created the first detailed plan for a type of network design called a transparent bridge (based on ideas from Mark Kempf and Radia Perlman). After multiple revisions and contributions from other writers, this plan became the IEEE 802 bridge specification, a widely used standard that forms the foundation of the transparent bridging industry. He also worked on a team at DEC that developed the Gigaswitch and the Giganet, which was an early version of Gigabit Ethernet.

Varghese is known for helping create the field of network algorithmics, which focuses on solving network challenges by combining methods from different areas, such as hardware, software, and efficient algorithms.

His work in this field includes Deficit Round Robin, an algorithm co-invented with M. Shreedhar that is used in routers to manage data flow, and timing wheels, an algorithm co-invented with Tony Lauck that helps systems handle timers quickly. Timing wheels are used in operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD.

Varghese also worked on improving fast IP lookup and packet classification. His research with G. Chandranmenon on Threaded indexes came before similar work done by Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. His research on multibit tries with V. Srinivasan has been used by companies like Microsoft. His work on scalable IP packet lookup with Waldvogel and Turner for longer addresses, such as IPv6, is being considered for use in Linux.

George also collaborated with Will Eatherton and Zubin Dittia on the Tree Bitmap IP lookup algorithm, which is used in Cisco's CRS-1 router. In May 2004, Guinness World Records recognized the CRS-1 as the Internet router with the highest capacity at 92 terabits per second. The design and scalability of the router were later studied in research about the efficiency of large routing tables.

George is also recognized for his work in the field of self-stabilization, a type of fault-tolerance. He helped develop several general methods, such as local checking, local correction, and counter flushing, with colleagues.

NetSift

Varghese co-founded NetSift Inc. with Sumeet Singh in 2004. He worked as the president and chief technology officer (CTO) of the company. NetSift helped start the idea of using automated methods to identify security threats and introduced the use of streaming algorithms to measure and protect networks at speeds faster than 10 Gbit/s. His research with Cristian Estan on multistage filters is widely used in the industry. In June 2005, NetSift was acquired by Cisco Systems as part of the Modular Switching Group.

Awards and honors

• Elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017
• Received the 2014 Koji Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communications for work on network algorithms used in high-speed packet networks
• Named an ACM Fellow in 2002
• Received the Best Teacher Award in Computer Science from UCSD in 2001, chosen by graduating undergraduate students
• Won the Best Tutorial Award at SIGMETRICS 98
• Received the Big Fish Mentor of the Year Award from the Association for Graduate Engineering Students (AGES) at Washington University in 1997
• Received the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1996. This award had 34 winners selected from 416 applicants across all sciences, with only 2 computer scientists chosen that year
• Won the Best Student Paper Award at PODC 96 for a paper co-authored with student Mahesh Jayaram
• Shared the Sproull Prize for the best MIT Computer Science thesis in 1993. Also nominated by MIT for the ACM Thesis Prize
• Was a DEC Graduate Education Program (GEEP) Scholar from 1989 to 1991

Selected publications

• Sumeet Singh, Cristian Estan, George Varghese, and Stefan Savage, "Automated Worm Fingerprinting," Published in the Proceedings of the 6th ACM/USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). This paper was the foundation for NetSift, as mentioned above.
• Cristian Estan, David Moore, and George Varghese, "Building a Better NetFlow," Published in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Portland, OR, September 2004.
• Fan Chung Graham, Ron Graham, and George Varghese, "Parallelism versus Memory Allocation in Pipelined Router Forwarding Engines," Published in the Proceedings of SPAA 2004 (invited and accepted for publication in the Theory of Computer Science journal as the best paper from SPAA), Barcelona, Spain, March 2004.
• W. Eatherton, Z. Dittia, and George Varghese, "Tree Bitmap: Hardware and Software IP Lookups with Incremental Updates" (no prior conference paper; the IP lookup algorithm was used in Cisco's most recent CRS-1 router), Published in ACM Computer Communications Review, Volume 34, April 2004.
• George Varghese, "Summary of a Ph.D. Thesis on Self-stabilization."