Les Cottrell

Roger (Les) Cottrell

I left the University of Manchester, England with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics to pursue fame and fortune on the Left Coast of the U.S.A. I joined SLAC as a research physicist in High Energy Physics, focusing on real-time data acquisition and analysis in the 1990 Nobel prize winning group that discovered the quark. In 1972/3, I spent a year's leave of absence as a visiting scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and in 1979/80 at the IBM U.K. Laboratories at Hursley, England, where I obtained United States Patent 4,688,181 for a a dynamic graphical cursor.

On returning from IBM UK, in 1980, I became the manager of SLAC's computer networking. In 1982 I became the Assistant Director of SLAC's Computer Services (SCS). From 1995-1997 I was the Acting Director of SCS. I stepped down from the Assistant Directorship in February 2008. I am now the manager of SLAC's computer networking and telecommunications. I am also a member of the Energy Sciences Network Site Coordinating Committee (ESCC). I served on many advisory groups such as for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), chaired the review of American Institute of Physics computing, IHEP/Beijing, Internet2, and FNAL, as well as technical committees such as chairing the ESCC Network Monitoring Working Group, and as a member of the Global Grid Foundation's Network Monitoring Working Group. I am the chairman of theInternational Committee for Future Accelerator's (ICFA) Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity's (SCIC) Monitoring Group. From 2010 through 2012 I served as a member of the Electronic Geophysical Year 2007-2008 working group on eGY-Africa (cyber-infrastructure for science in Africa). I am a member of the International Advisory Panel for the faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology at the University of Malaysia in Sarawak.

I was a leader of the effort that, in 1994, resulted in the first permanent Internet connection to mainland China, also see the YouTube video. In 2002/3, I was the co-PI of teams that captured the Internet2 Land Speed Record twice, a feat that was entered in the Guinness Book of World Records and also earned us the CENIC 2003 On the Road to a Gigabit, Biggest Fastest in the West award. In 2003, 2004, and for a third time in 2005 I was the co-leader of the teams that won the SuperComputing Bandwidth Challenge for the maximum bandwidth utilization.

I am also the PI of the DoE funded Internet End-to-end Performance Monitoring (IEPM) project which has attracted funding of almost $2M since 1997. I am the SLAC PI of the DoE funded Terapaths project, the SLAC/NIIT/MAGGIE project, the collaboration with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, the collaboration with the <a data-cke-saved-href="http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~cottrell/http" href="http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~cottrell/http" www.nust.edu.pk"="">National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) in Islamabad Pakistan, and with the University of Malaysia in Sarawak (UNIMAS) in Kuching.

Professional Interests

Networking and distributed computing technology are my main activities. In partcicular I am focusing on network monitoring and high performance networking. More recently I have focused much activity on measuring the Internet's Digital Divide in particular as it applies to Developing countries. I contributed the opening chapter (The Internet, Mobile Computing and Mobile Phones in Developing Countries) in the book m-Science Sensing, Computing and Disemmination, published November 1010 (ISBN 92-95003-43-8).

I am also very interested in the Web, since being at SLAC (the first Web site outside Europe) in the Web's early days at SLAC, the First North American Web site. I used it and as assistant director of computing was able to actively support its development at SLAC. I also contributed a chapter to the book HTML and CGI Unleashed published by Sams/Macmillan 1996,