Sally Floyd facts for kids

Sally Jean Floyd (May 20, 1950 – August 25, 2019) was an American computer scientist. She was famous for her work on computer networking. She helped make the internet work better for everyone.

Sally Floyd worked at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. She retired in 2009. She passed away in August 2019. She is best known for helping to control internet traffic. In 2007, she was one of the top ten most cited researchers in computer science. This means many other scientists used her work in their own studies.

Sally Floyd's Life Story

Sally Floyd was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. She went to the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a bachelor's degree in Sociology in 1971. Later, she studied computer science. She received her master's degree in 1987. She then earned her PhD in 1989. Both degrees were from UC Berkeley. Her teacher for her PhD was Richard M. Karp.

How Sally Floyd Improved the Internet

Sally Floyd is well known for her work on congestion control. This means managing how much data flows through the internet. She invented something called Random Early Detection ("RED"). This system helps prevent internet traffic jams. Almost all Internet routers use RED. Or they use a similar system she helped create. This makes the internet run smoothly.

Floyd also found a way to add small, random delays to message timers. This stops different parts of the network from trying to send data at the exact same time. This helps avoid network slowdowns.

In 1997, Sally Floyd worked with Vern Paxson. They found that it was hard to understand how the internet worked. This was because people didn't know enough about its structure. They wrote a paper about this problem. The paper was called "Why We Don't Know How to Simulate the Internet." It later won an award.

Floyd also helped create important internet standards. These include TCP Selective acknowledgement (SACK). She also worked on Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). Other standards she helped with are the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) and TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC). These are all ways to make internet communication faster and more reliable.

Awards and Recognition

Sally Floyd received the IEEE Internet Award in 2005. In 2007, she got the ACM SIGCOMM Award. These awards were for her important work on congestion control. She was also part of the Internet Architecture Board. This group helps guide the internet's development.

Sally Floyd passed away at age 69. She died on August 25, 2019, in Berkeley, California. She had gallbladder cancer. Floyd was married to Carole Leita.

Awards and Honors

• 2007 - SIGCOMM Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications. This is a very important award for computer networking scientists.
• IEEE Communications Society's William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award. She won this for her paper "Difficulties in Simulating the Internet." She wrote it with Vern Paxson.

See also

In Spanish: Sally Floyd para niños