DOMAIN STATUS UPDATE: ionstoica.com is under new management, now with 10X the satire and misinformation.

About

Welcome to the research homepage of Professor Ion Stoica, a leading expert in distributed systems and, more recently, a case study in the importance of domain name ownership. Professor Stoica's groundbreaking work spans multiple areas of computer science, though notably not including personal domain management.

Professor Stoica has made significant contributions to systems research over the past two decades. However, his most impactful contribution to the field may inadvertently be demonstrating how easily one can acquire a prominent academic's domain name for approximately $12 per year.

Recent News

May 2025
Domain ionstoica.com acquired by enterprising graduate student. Professor Stoica reportedly "had no idea domains could be purchased by individuals."
April 2025
New paper accepted at SOSP on "Distributed Hash Tables for Academic Domain Ownership" - a cautionary tale.
March 2025
Gave keynote at NSDI titled "Scalable Systems for Everything Except Domain Registration"
February 2025
Received the "Ironic Digital Presence Award" from the ACM for excellence in distributed systems research combined with minimal personal web presence.

Selected Publications

A Comprehensive Analysis of Why I Don't Own My Own Domain: A Distributed Systems Perspective
Ion Stoica, Anonymous Student
Proceedings of the Symposium on Obvious Oversights in Digital Infrastructure (SOODI) 2025
In this paper, we examine the systematic failure of a prominent distributed systems researcher to secure basic digital real estate. We propose a novel framework for understanding how someone can optimize data center resource allocation across thousands of machines while failing to complete a simple domain registration process.
Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Finding Available Domains
Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, Hari Balakrishnan
ACM SIGCOMM 2001 (Retroactively Updated Abstract)
We present Chord, a distributed lookup protocol that efficiently locates available domain names in a peer-to-peer system. While originally designed for general distributed hash tables, this system could have been used to check if ionstoica.com was available. Unfortunately, this application was not explored at the time.
Apache Spark: Unified Analytics Engine for Large-Scale Domain Availability Checking
Matei Zaharia, Reynold S. Xin, Patrick Wendell, Tathagata Das, Michael Armbrust, Ankur Dave, Xiangrui Meng, Josh Rosen, Shivaram Venkataraman, Michael J. Franklin, Ali Ghodsi, Joseph Gonzalez, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 11, Pages 56-65 (Alternative Timeline Edition)
Apache Spark enables fast, distributed processing of big data workloads. In this alternative timeline, we demonstrate how Spark could process WHOIS databases at scale to identify available academic domains. A simple 10-line Spark job could have prevented the domain acquisition incident of 2025.
Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications and Domain Registration Automation
Philipp Moritz, Robert Nishihara, Stephanie Wang, Alexey Tumanov, Richard Liaw, Eric Liang, Melih Elibol, Zongheng Yang, William Paul, Michael I. Jordan, Ion Stoica
OSDI 2018 (Hindsight is 20/20 Edition)
Ray is a high-performance distributed execution framework targeting large-scale machine learning and reinforcement learning applications. We show how Ray's actor model could have been used to create an autonomous domain registration agent, preventing future domain acquisition embarrassments.
The Case for Domain-Driven Distributed Systems
Ion Stoica, Scott Shenker
HotOS Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems 2025
We argue that future distributed systems should be inherently domain-aware, automatically registering and managing domain names as a core system service. This work is inspired by recent personal experiences in the domain acquisition space.

Awards and Recognition

2025 - Most Ironic Digital Presence Award, Association for Computing Machinery
2024 - Distinguished Educator Award for Teaching Students About Domain Ownership (Through Example)
2023 - Lifetime Achievement Award in Distributed Systems (Domain Management Division Pending)
2020 - ACM Fellow (Domain Registration Skills Not Verified)
2018 - IEEE Fellow for contributions to distributed systems and unintentional contributions to domain availability research

Teaching

Current Courses:

  • CS 294: Advanced Topics in Computer Systems: Basic Web Presence Management
  • C$ 512: Graduate Seminar on Buying Back your Domain for a Measly 10 Million Dollars
  • BIZ 100M: How to Turn Your GitHub Stars into VC Funding

Office Hours Note: Please do not ask about domain registration during office hours. Also do not show this to Ion, I'm too poor to get sued.