David Patrick Reed (born January 31, 1952) is an American computer scientist, educated at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, known for a number of significant contributions to

computer networking A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

and wireless communications networks. He was involved in the early development of

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

, and was the designer of the

User Datagram Protocol In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in Network packet, packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protoco ...

(UDP), though he finds this title "a little embarrassing". He was also one of the authors of the original paper about the

end-to-end principle The end-to-end principle is a design principle in computer networking that requires application-specific features (such as reliability and security) to be implemented in the communicating end nodes of the network, instead of in the network itse ...

, ''End-to-end arguments in system design'', published in 1984. He is also known for Reed's law, his assertion that the utility of large networks, particularly

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

s, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. From 2003–2010, Reed was an

adjunct professor An adjunct professor is a type of academic appointment in higher education who does not work at the establishment full-time. The terms of this appointment and the job security of the tenure vary in different parts of the world, but the term is gen ...

at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

, where he co-led th
Viral Communications
group and the Communication Futures program. He currently serves as a senior vice president of the Chief Scientist Group at SAP Labs. He is one of six principal architects of the

Croquet project The Croquet Project is a software project that was intended to promote the continued development of the Croquet open-source software, open-source software development kit to create and deliver collaborative multi-user online application software ...

(along with

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox ...

, Julian Lombardi, Andreas Raab, David A. Smith, and Mark McCahill). He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. His 1978 dissertation introduced

multiversion concurrency control Multiversion concurrency control (MCC or MVCC), is a non-locking concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement transactional memory. ...

(MVCC). MVCC is a

concurrency control In information technology and computer science, especially in the fields of computer programming, operating systems, multiprocessors, and databases, concurrency control ensures that correct results for concurrent operations are generated, whil ...

method commonly used by

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

s to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement

transactional memory In computer science and computer engineering, engineering, transactional memory attempts to simplify concurrent programming by allowing a group of load and store instructions to execute in an linearizability, atomic way. It is a concurrency control ...

.refs
Clojure. Retrieved on 2013-09-18.

References

External links

*
Reed's Locus

Biography

Naming and synchronization in a decentralized computer system (Reed's thesis, 1978)
Living people American computer scientists MIT School of Architecture and Planning faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni 1952 births MIT Media Lab people {{US-compu-bio-stub