Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie have been collaborating on systems projects and writing networking textbooks since the 1990s. Their book Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, a staple of networking curricula for the last 30 years, is now in its sixth edition. That introductory textbook, along with several new books focused on emerging topics in network and cloud systems, are available as open source at https://systemsapproach.org.
Larry spent most of his career in academia, first at the University of Arizona and later at Princeton University, where he was the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science. While at Princeton he directed the PlanetLab Consortium, building a global testbed for research on Internet-scale services. A CDN startup he helped spin out of PlanetLab was acquired by Akamai in 2010. In 2013 Larry transitioned to Emeritus status at Princeton and joined the Open Networking Lab (now the Open Networking Foundation) where he served as CTO, leading the design of open source platforms for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and edge cloud computing. He currently chairs the Technical Steering Team for Aether, a Private 5G Project of the Linux Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He currently lives in Tucson Arizona.
Bruce began his networking career at Bellcore where he worked on the Aurora Gigabit testbed, which led to his first collaboration with Larry on high-speed host-network interfaces. He then went to Cisco where he led a team of architects responsible for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). He worked extensively at the IETF on standardizing MPLS and various quality of service technologies. Bruce also spent five years as a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2012 he joined Software Defined Networking (SDN) startup Nicira as a lead architect and was then a principal engineer at VMware following the acquisition of Nicira. In 2017 he took on the role of VP and CTO for the Asia Pacific region at VMware, which gave him the opportunity to return to Australia. He is a Fellow of the ACM and chaired ACM SIGCOMM from 2009 to 2013. He received the ACM SIGCOMM award in 2025.