Eric Boyd, Ph.D., is the director of networks with Information and Technology Services (ITS) at the University of Michigan. He leads the network operations, network engineering, and network software teams in the design, implementation, and operation of the campus network. He is responsible for the campus WiFi network, which includes over 15,00 access points campus-wide. In addition, Dr. Boyd works with research faculty in service to the research mission of the university and is co-lead of the open source perfSONAR project. He is the principal investigator for NetBASILISK, an NSF-funded grant that will explore network security and network performance that are critical to the research, teaching, and learning missions of the higher education community.
From 2002 to 2016, Dr. Boyd worked at Internet2 in a variety of positions, including senior director for Strategic Projects. While at Internet2, Dr. Boyd co-founded the widely deployed open source monitoring framework known as perfSONAR. During his nearly 15 years at Internet2, perfSONAR grew to become the global standard for network monitoring in the research and education community, with over 2,000 perfSONAR nodes deployed worldwide.
While at Internet2, Dr. Boyd also lead the development of the Open Exchange Software Suite (OESS) and FlowSpace Firewall (FSFW) by the GlobalNOC at Indiana University. OESS and FSFW served as the software underpinnings of the Internet2 Advanced Layer 2 Service (AL2S). Together, both software products formed the first nation-wide, OpenFlow deployment on a national network capable of network virtualization and have been used since 2012 to run the production Internet2 backbone service.
Dr. Boyd’s other efforts at Internet2 included leading development teams that built the OSCARS and DRAGON software suites (predecessors of OESS), and widely used performance tools such as BWCTL, OWAMP, and NDT.
At Internet2, Dr. Boyd was the PI for the DOE and NSF-funded perfSONAR workshop and Internet2 co chair of the Joint Techs program committee. Dr. Boyd was the PI for Internet2’s GENI-funded OpenFlow project (experimenting with OpenFlow on the backbone), Internet2’s NSF-funded DYNES (expanding the reach for the IDC circuit framework into Internet2-member regionals and campuses), Internet2’s NSF-funded IRIS project (developing perfSONAR software on the IRNC links) and Internet2’s NSF-funded DyGIR project (developing OSCARS/DRAGON software on the IRN links). Dr. Boyd coordinated Internet2’s involvement with OGF and DICE, and oversaw Internet2’s ION, performance, transport, and information services Working Groups.
Dr. Boyd earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan, under the direction of Dr. Edward Davidson (now retired), writing his thesis on the “Performance Evaluation and Improvement of High Performance Architectures and Applications.” He served as an engineering principal in the Unix Groups of both Compaq/Digital and Hewlett-Packard writing advanced performance analysis tools for enterprise-class servers. He led the research and development group at SolidSpeed Networks, creating such products as a content delivery network, a distributed peer-to-peer website performance measuring system, and a software-based global load balancer.