Ken Birman

Kenneth P. Birman
N. Rama Rao Professor of Computer Science
435 Gates Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

W: 607-255-9199; M: 607-227-0894; F: 607-255-9143
Email: ken@cs.cornell.edu   CV: Feb 24 

Current Research (full publications list). 

Teaching:  

Video links: 

My Textbook (last revised in 2012):   

Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems: Building High-Assurance Applications and Cloud-Hosted Services.   Click here to get to my cloud computing course, which has slide sets and other materials that include some lectures strongly tied to content from the book.  You are welcome to use these in your own courses if you like. The 2018 slide set is quite new and was one of the outcomes of my 2016-2017 sabbatical during which I visited widely and hopefully, came home with an updated appreciation of the contemporary perspectives seen in industry. But this means that by now, I've departed significantly from the treatment in the book; earlier slide sets that are closer to the book treatment can be found in http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs5412/XXXXsp, where XXXX would be the year. There was no 2013 or 2017 offering.

The bad news is that the material evolves at a breathtaking pace, which is why I keep revising the slides. Natually, this also means that the book is already out of date. I don't have the time to revise it, right now.
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Older work. I've really worked in Cloud Computing for most of my career, although it obviously wasn't called cloud computing in the early days. As a result, our papers in this area date back to 1985.

Some examples of mission-critical systems on which my software was used in the past include the New York Stock Exchange and Swiss Exchange, the French Air Traffic Control system, the AEGIS warship and a wide range of applications in settings like factory process control and telephony. In fact, every stock quote or trade on the NYSE from 1995 until early 2006 was reported to the overhead trading consoles through software I personally implemented - a cool (but also scary) image, for me at least! During the ten years this system was running, many computers crashed during the trading day, and many network problems have occurred - but the design we developed and implemented has managed to reconfigure itself automatically and kept the overall system up, without exception. They didn't have a single trading disruption during the entire period. As far as I know, the other organizations listed above have similar stories to report.

Today, these kinds of ideas are gaining "mainstream" status. For example, IBM's Websphere 6.0 product includes a multicast layer used to replicate data and other runtime state for high-availability web service applications and web sites. Although IBM developed its own implementation of this technology, we've been told by the developers that the architecture was based on Cornell's Horus and Ensemble systems, described more fully below. The CORBA architecture includes a fault-tolerance mechanism based on some of the same ideas. And we've also worked with Microsoft on the technology at the core of the next generation of that company's clustering product. So, you'll find Cornell's research not just on these web pages, but also on web sites worldwide and in some of the world's most ambitious data centers and high availability computing systems.

In fact we still have very active dialogs with many of these companies: Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, and others. An example of a more recent dialog is this: a few years ago worked with Cisco to invent a new continuous availability option for their core Internet routers, the CRS-1 series. You can read about this work here.

My group often works with vendors and industry researchers. We maintain a very active dialog with the US government and military on research challenges emerging from a future generation communication systems now being planned by organizations like the Air Force and the Navy. We've even worked on new ways of controlling the electric power grid, but not in time to head off the big blackout in 2003! Looking to the future, we are focused on needs arising in financial systems, large-scale military systems, and even health-care networks. (In this connection, I should perhaps mention that although we do get research support from the government and the US military, none of our research is classified or even sensitive, and all of it focuses on widely used commercial standards and platforms. Most of our software is released for free, under open source licenses.)

I'm just one of many members of a group in this area at Cornell. My closest colleagues and co-leaders of the group are Robbert van Renesse and Hakim Weatherspoon. But the systems group is very strong and broad right now, and the three of us have great relationships and collaborations with many other systems faculty here at Cornell (both in the systems area within CS, but also folks in ECE where we have great ties, MAE, IS, and down in New York City, where a few faculty are members of our fast-growing New York City Technology "outpost" on Roosveldt Island.

Four generations of reliable distributed systems research! Overall, our group has developed three generations of technology and is now working on a fourth generation system: The Isis Toolkit, developed mostly during 1987-1993, the Horus system, developed starting in 1990 until around 1995, the Ensemble system, 1995-1999. Right now we're developing a number of new systems including Isis2, Gradient, and the reliable TCP solution mentioned above, and working with others to integrate those solutions into settings where reliability, security, consistency and scalability are make-or-break requirements. Older Research web pages: Live Objects, Quicksilver, Maelstrom, Ricochet and Tempest projects Ensemble project Horus project Isis Toolkit (really old stuff!  This is from the very first version of Isis). A collection of papers on Isis, edited by myself with Robbert van Renesse, may still be available -- it was called Reliable Distributed Computing with the Isis Toolkit and was in the IEEE Press Computer Science series.

Graduate Studies in Computer Science at Cornell: At this time of the year, we get large numbers of inquiries about our PhD program. I want to recommend that people interested in the program not contact faculty members like me directly with routine questions like "can your research group fund me".

As you'll see from the web page, Cornell does admissions by means of a committee, so individual faculty members don't normally play a role. This is different from many other schools -- I realize that at many places, each faculty member admits people into her/his own group. But at Cornell, we admit you first, then you come here, and then you affiliate with a research group after a while. Funding is absolutely guaranteed for people in the MS/PhD program during the whole time they are at Cornell. On the other hand, students in the MEng program generally need to pay their own way.

Obviously, some people have more direct, specific questions, and there is no problem sending those to me or to anyone else. But as for the generic "can I join your research group?" the answer is that while I welcome people into the group if they demonstrate good ideas and talent in my area, until you are here and take my graduate course and spend time talking with me and my colleagues, how can we know if the match is good? And most such inquiries are from people who haven't yet figured out quite how many good projects are underway at Cornell. Perhaps, on arrival, you'll take Andrew Myer's course in language based security and will realize this is your passion. So at Cornell, we urge you to take time to find out what areas we cover and who is here, to take some courses, and only then affiliate with a research group. But please knock on my door any time you like! I'm more than happy to talk to any student in the department about anything we're doing here!

Photo credit: Dave Burbank