A relatively new effort at Cornell is Energy Aware Systems. In the area of low-power sensor networking, Van Renesse has looked a power-aware epidemic protocols (SRDS 2002). Hakim Weatherspoon and his students are looking at designing datacenter storage systems that are frugal with energy use. The KyotoFS file system (HotOS 2007) is a log-structured file system. Using multiple disks, only the disk that stores the head of the log has to be spinning most of the time, leading to significant energy savings.

Computer Networks is another important research area at Cornell. Paul Francis, well-known for his invention of Network Address Translation (ACM SIGCOMM CCR 1993), is particularly interested in manageability and scalability of the Internet. For example, CONman (SIGCOMM 2007) significantly simplifies network management by disentangling the data plane and the management plane. Robbert van Renesse and Ken Birman have done extensive work on optimizing protocols stacks (SIGCOMM 1996, SOSP 1999). Andrew Myers and Emin Gun Sirer developed Trickles (NSDI 2005), a stateless network protocol stack. Ken Birman and Hakim Weatherspoon developed the Maelstrom network appliance (NSDI 2008), intended to efficiently link together datacenters connected by high-bandwidth, high-latency links using FEC codes.

Cornell faculty has done extensive work in the Peer-to-Peer networking area, ranging from file sharing to media streaming to network monitoring. Paul Francis co-designed the CAN Distributed Hash Table (SIGCOMM 2001). Van Renesse and Birman developed the highly scalable Astrolabe network monitoring system (IPTPS 2002, ACM TOCS 2003), now used at a major e-retailer. Emin Gun Sirer has created a large number of P2P systems, including Octant (NSDI 2007), a system for geolocation of Internet hosts, and Corona, an Internet-scale Publish-Subscribe system (NSDI 2006). Van Renesse developed Fireflies, a Byzantine-tolerant P2P overlay network (Eurosys 2006). Weatherspoon designed and implemented the Antiquity system, a secure P2P storage facility (Eurosys 2007).

Cornell is particularly well-known for its work on fault-tolerant distributed systems. Fred Schneider's oft-referenced State Machine Replication tutorial is standard fare in systems courses around the world (ACM Computing Surveys 1990). Van Renesse and Schneider formalized and analyzed the Chain Replication paradigm (OSDI 2004). Ken Birman's ISIS system (SOSP 1985, SOSP 1987) has been extensively used in industry for building fault-tolerant systems. Currently, Birman and his team are developing Live Objects (ECOOP 2008, Middleware 2008), a new paradigm for building secure, self-repairing applications using drag-and-drop concepts. Robbert van Renesse is investigating various aspects of tolerating Byzantine failures (NSDI 2008, DISC 2008).