Three questions with a new staff member!  

Marc Körner is the most recent addition to the ESnet Software Engineering – Orchestration and Core Data team (OCD).  He comes to us from Join Digital in San Jose where he was Lead Engineer in their Network Services team.  

Marc has a PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin, and has spent a number of years working as a researcher in both the Berlin and Berkeley areas. He’ll be working on the automation side of OCD getting familiar with the network services orchestrator platform and helping us achieve our ESnet6 deliverables. Marc is onboarding virtually this week but resides full time in the San Jose area.

What brought you to ESnet?

I was always very passionate about computer networks. The idea of having a global technology for the data and knowledge exchange was always very fascinating for me. It started with the LAN sessions I had with my friends and ended up with the tremendous opportunity to build the first SDN research network in Europe. After my time as a research fellow at the UC Berkeley Netsys lab group and my startup experiences in the access network provider business, the open position for the network automation at ESnet was the ultimate opportunity to take it to the next level.

What is the most exciting thing going on in your field right now?

This question is not easy to answer, there are so many things going on in computer networks. I think one of the biggest innovations in the last decade is the virtualization in general and the centralization of network management and control. However, one of the more recent trends which correlates with this particular network development is edge computing, or the slightly more generalized concept of fog computing and its seamless orchestration. It’s basically a fine granular fusion of the compute and network control plan, which we also observed in cloud computing.

What book would you recommend?

It has been a while since I read a book. As an EECS guy people are probably expecting something to hear like: “The programming language C by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie”. However, if you are interested in science in general I would probably recommend: “The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking”. The book provides some interesting insights about modern physics and has the potential to open up interesting views on the world around us.