Nominee’s bio (or LinkedIn profile link)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cedriclam/
I am co-founder and engineering director at Google Fiber. I graduated from Hong Kong University with B. Eng (First Class Honours) and PhD from UCLA, both in Electrical Engineering. Upon graduation from UCLA, I joined AT&T Labs - Research to work on broadband access technologies, where I did research on WDM-PON and HFC technologies. I was Chief System Architect at Opvista, a startup company selling ultra-dense DWDM transmission systems. I joined Google in 2009 as architect for datacenter networks before I started as the first engineer on the Google Fiber project. Currently, I am leading the engineering R&D effort and the architecture team at Google Fiber. I spearheaded the effort in the the design and commercialization of super-PON at Google Fiber to consoldidate central offices. The super-PON effort complements the CORD's goal of transforming central offices into datacenters, but with higher efficiency. IEEE 802.3 has recently formed a Study Group to standardize the super-PON technology. I am a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
How long have been working in the CORD community?
Since the beginning of 2018, I had been participating in the CORD community.
What contributions have you made in the past to the CORD community?
Way before I started working with the CORD community, I launched an internal project at Google to reform access network architecture. Co-incidentally, the proposed new architecture bared many resemblence with the CORD architecture, in the sense that the spine-and-leaf switch architecture had been used as the switching fabric. The independent effort within Google Fiber also has many differences with the CORD project. For example, we considered OLT uplink redundancy which is important in an operator network. In addition, instead of virtualizing BNG functions onto stacks of x86 servers, we looked at disaggregate the BNG functions on OLTs and spine-and-leaf switches and completely dissolve the BNG layer, improve performance and reduce costs. In addition, my team has also contribute a set of provisioning step and procedures into the CORD community. We are also working with our vendors and driving them into the CORD open platform direction.
What are you actively working on in CORD?
Network architecture and operator's requirements. We are also setting up a live CORD testbed in our lab with production traffic on it. Eventually, we would like to run CORD over our super-PON architecture and demonstrate significant operation benefit and efficiency.
Why do you feel you would be a good candidate for this position?
I have been a technologist and had been building products from physical layer to network management systems. Right now, I am heading the architecture effort at Google Fiber. Google Fiber is an innovative carrier willing to try new technologies and push the evelope. Also, I initiated our internal CORD-like architecture project, independently came up with an architecture similar to CORD and I am still driving the evolution of this project. It would be good to both contibute to and benefit from the bigger community.
Are there any changes you would like to bring to the community if elected into this position?
Anything we do at Google here, we are thinking about scale and being able to put into real use. So I would like to make sure that when we build the CORD system, we really take into account need of real operators and come up with a design that can be used in real production. Just like Linux today.