DNS Inventor Gets Award

LONDON -- Nominum, the leading provider of IP address management infrastructure solutions, today announced its chief scientist Paul Mockapetris is the 2005 recipient of the prestigious ACM SIGCOMM lifetime award. Paul is widely known and respected for his role in the creation of the Domain Name System (DNS).

The ACM SIGCOMM award was initiated in 1989 as a means of honouring computer and communication professionals for outstanding technical achievement in the fields of data and computer communications.

Paul's best-known contribution to technology is his role as the creator of the DNS, 22 years ago, while working at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. The DNS is fundamental to the Internet, powering all web-based applications; from a simple email and web look-up, through to VoIP phone calls and RFID. Paul's earlier work at UC Irvine, MIT and IBM focused on multiprocessor operating systems, virtual machines and ring LAN technology.

"The Domain Name System (DNS) -- the distributed database that translates names like www.acm.org into numerical addresses that routers can understand -- lies at the heart of every user experience with the Internet. ACM SIGCOMM is proud to recognise Dr. Paul Mockapetris for his foundational work in designing and developing DNS, and for the important role he has played in the development of the Internet architecture," said Jennifer Rexford, Chair of ACM SIGCOMM.

Paul's other accomplishments include his work on the design of email systems, for which he wrote the first implementation of the Internet's Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Further to this, Paul has held management positions for both the USC's Information Sciences Institute and ARPA, overseeing networking projects across the US and Europe.

For more than thirty years, Paul has made an ongoing commitment to invention and the Internet. He continues to influence its evolution through his past and present participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including chairing the IETF itself from 1994 to 1996. Paul is a featured speaker at numerous industry conferences including, ITU Telecom World, Burton Group Catalyst Conferences and Interop.

"It's a tremendous honour to be recognised by ACM SIGCOMM and to stand alongside its other distinguished recipients," said Paul Mockapetris. "It is especially poignant to receive this award at a time when the Internet is impacting on society like never before. While the Internet has come a long way there is still much to do in terms of making the network more useful and secure"

Nominum Inc.