SYSTEMS

Inventor of Spanning Tree, Robust and Scalable Routing, and Innovations in Network Security Joins Ranks of Sun's Most Prestigious Technical Staff: Sun Microsystems, the creator of the open-source Solaris Operating System (OS), announced that Radia Perlman, in recognition of her considerable technical expertise and profound impact on the fields of network security and routing, has been named a Sun Fellow. Perlman, Sun Fellow, Network Protocols and Security Project of Sun Laboratories, is best known for her invention of the Spanning Tree Algorithm, a key technology used in local-area networks, and for innovations that have made link state routing protocols robust, efficient, and scalable. Perlman has more than 80 patents issued with more pending, and her two books, Interconnections and Network Security, are widely used by engineers and as textbooks in universities. Her many awards include the USENIX 2006 lifetime achievement award, SVIPLA 2004 Inventor of the Year award, and an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (KTH). She was named by both Network World and Data Communications Magazineas one of the most influential people in networking. She has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT. Currently, Perlman is driving an ambitious project within Sun Labs focused on designing the successor to spanning tree bridging. She is also investigating robust and secure data storage with assured delete.