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Algoryhme by Radia Perlman

29th August 2008 by 3 Comments

Radia Perlman penned this poem while she developed Spanning Tree.

Algorhyme

I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree that must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.
First, the root must be selected.
By ID, it is elected.
Least-cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree, these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me,
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
óRadia Perlman

Radia Perlman is the inventor of Spanning Tree (beloved by all mendicants) and she works at Sun where continues to produce major advances in computer networking. Check out here bio

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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • http://packetlife.net stretch

    Maybe if she spent more time on spanning tree and less on poetry we wouldn’t have a fifty-second failover time.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      if you read radia’s most excellent book you would know that 15 seconds was the best estimate for the Z80 CPU a few hundred us to run spantree plus propagation of bpdu’s across the DEC campus, plus a small safety margin.

      Who knew that we would have this much CPU and bandwidth ? Spanning tree is a beautiful and elegant protocol that solves a difficult problem. You should be blamng Ethernet not spanning tree

  • http://msaqib.blogspot.com Muhammad Saqib Ilyas

    Correction: She wasn’t the inventor of Spanning Tree. She was the inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol.