This talk will give an overview of the current state of the Internet and will then visit some of the scaling problems currently being faced. Some of these problems must be solved just to keep the basic machinery operating in the face of the explosive growth. Other problems raise deep questions about possible limits on the exploitability of a planet-sized distributed environment. For someone seeking a truly choice problem to think about, the Internet today is a veritable smorgasboard of problems, opportunities, ideas, and potential colleagues.
And it just keeps getting better.
Mike O'Dell is Vice-President of Research and Development at UUNET Technologies, Inc., one of the national-scale IP network operators in the US. Prior to joining UUNET, he was at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, NJ. Way back in 1980, he was site liaison for ARPAnet IMP-34 at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. While at LBL, he collaborated on the RAND VAX/NFE for ARPAnet NCP, did research on the real-world behavior of token rings, and ran one of the first VAXen to go production with TCP/IP even before The Great TCP Conversion. He has been kicking around the UNIX world longer than he cares to contemplate. He is outgoing Vice-President of the USENIX Association and is Co-Director of the Operations Requirements Area of the IETF and the Internet Engineering Steering Group.