Innovator Profiles-Steve Corbato

'In physics, you’re taught about scaling . . . . networks [are] scaling challenges.'

Steven Corbato developed an interest in broadband Internet infrastructure through a background in experimental astrophysics, a history he shares with many researchers working at the TCP and IP middleware levels. But while some would-be cosmologists went into private networking companies or became software specialists inside carriers, Corbato got to play with public plumbing.

He took a post at the University of Washington to oversee a massive academic point of presence for the Pacific Northwest (called a GigaPOP, or Gigabit point of presence) and moved to managing a regional broadband network called Project Abilene. This work propelled Corbato into his post as director of network infrastructure for Internet2, a nonprofit consortium that develops advanced network technologies, where he divides his time between the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing and a home base in Ann Arbor, Mich.

As Corbato tells some of his own story, "I was working on an astrophysics experiment in the western Utah desert. I always had an interest in what you would now call the information technology side of physics. As we were doing that experiment, we began to use Internet Protocol for data acquisition and other aspects of controlling the experiment. I became attracted to the technology in part because it became so much easier to ship data around, but also because of the remarkable scalability involved.

"That may be why a lot of physicists have gotten involved in this field. In physics, you're taught about scaling, and as you build networks, you're always faced with challenges that say, ‘I can do this at this scale, but what's going to be different when we're facing an order of magnitude more?'

Later, I had the good fortune from my second month at the University of Washington to be exposed to the formative process of Internet2."