User:Ken Birman

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Ken Birman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is best known for developing the Isis Toolkit and founding a company, Isis Distributed Systems, which introduced the virtual synchrony execution model for multicast communication and then used it as the basis for a wide range of robust software solutions for stock exchanges, air traffic control, and factory automation. Although the company no longer exists, Isis continues to operate the New York and Swiss Stock Exchanges, the French air traffic control system, and the US Navy AEGIS warship. The technology permits these and other systems to automatically adapt themselves when failures or other disruptions occur, to securely share keys and security policy data, and to replicate critical services so that availability can be maintained even while some system components are down. Birman is also the author of several books, most recently "Reliable Distributed Computing: Technologies, Web Services, and Applications", which was published by Springer-Verlag in May of 2007. He was Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems from 1993-1998 and is a Fellow of the ACM. Starting in 1990, Birman’s primary research emphasis has been on scalability of distributed systems, security technologies, and system management tools often using peer-to-peer or gossip/epidemic protocols. A complete list of publications can be found at [1].

Ken's group has built quite a bit of software that can be downloaded, free. A web page describing the available technologies is here.