Peter Steenkiste is a Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at
Peter Steenkiste's research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed computing. While at CMU, Peter Steenkiste worked on Nectar, the first workstation clusters built around a high-performance, switch-based local area network. He contributed both to the optimization of the communication subsystem and to the development of programming tools for workstation clusters. The optimization of application-level communication performance over commodity networks was further explored in the Gigabit Nectar and Credit Net projects. All these projects developed prototype systems that were used by a wide range of application groups, allowing a realistic evaluation of the research.
Peter Steenkiste's current research is in the areas of wireless networking,
distributed computing, and pervasive computing. The wireless landscape has changed
dramatically in recent years. Not only have we seen a rapid growth in the use
of wireless, but we are also seeing different types of deployments (e.g.
unplanned and managed residential deployments in addition to traditional
campus-style deployments) and more diversity in the technologies (e.g.
Bluetooth, sensors, ..). Peter Steenkiste is involved in wireless projects in a
number of areas, including self-management techniques for residential networks,
emulation as a basis for evaluating wireless technologies, and the use of
software radios as a platform for flexible, self-optimizing wireless protocols.
In the area of distributed
computing, he looking at Internet-scale network services that self-configure
and self-optimize, i.e. they automatically adapt to changes in the network and
load. Peter Steenkiste is also
active in pervasive computing in the context of the CMU Aura project. The goal
of Aura is to create a distraction-free pervasive computing environment that
proactively helps users with daily tasks. In Aura, his research focus is on
supporting adaptive and proactive applications, wireless networks, and
device-rich spaces.
Peter Steenkiste is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE. He
has been on many program committees and he was co-chair for the OPENSIG'99
workshop and the "Eight International Workshop on Quality of Service
(IWQOS'00)". He was also program chair for HPDC'2000 and general co-chair
for ACM SIGCOMM'02. More recently, he was program co-chair for MobiCom 2008.
He has been an associated editor for IEEE Transactions on
Parallel and Distributed Systems (1998-1999), IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Networking (2000-2003), and Cluster Computing (2000-2004),
and he is currently on the
editorial board of the "Journal of Grid Computing".