Yair Amir

Professor, Johns Hopkins University

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans -- John Lennon
If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there -- George Harrison

Department of Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD 21218
E-mail: yairamir at cs.jhu.edu, Office: 410-516-4803, Fax: 410-516-6134, Home: 301-859-4803.
Inventing high performance, survivable and secure distributed systems that make a difference.

Director of the Distributed Systems and Networks lab (DSN) at the Department of Computer Science here at Hopkins.
Founder of Spread Concepts LLC.
On sabbatical as co-founder and Chief Science Officer of LiveTimeNet Inc.

Research interests:

Creator of the SMesh seamless wireless backbone (2006), the Spines overlay network (2003), the Wackamole N-Way Failover for servers and routers (2001), the Backhand clustering project (1999), and the Spread toolkit (1997). These systems are deployed in thousands of mission critical systems, are included in commercial products, and are used for research and teaching in universities and research labs all over the world. Combined, we registered over 35,000 distinct downloads for these systems over the last 10 years.
Resume.

Publications:

My latest publications including all the publications connected with my work at the DSN lab at Hopkins can be found at the lab's publications page.

Here is an archive of my publications on the Transis and Totem projects and some later work not connected with the DSN lab.

Courses I teach:

Intermediate Programming (600.120)

Distributed Systems (600.437)

Operating Systems (600.418)

Advanced Distributed Systems and Communication (600.667)

My lecture in Introduction to Computer Science (600.103)

My students:

Current students conducting graduate research

Jonathan Kirsch - Fifth year Ph.D. candidate working on Scalable, Survivable Distributed Architectures.

Raluca Musaloiu-E. - Fifth year Ph.D. candidate working on Practical Wireless Mesh Networks and their Applications.

Students that completed graduate research

John Lane - Thesis: Scaling Byzantine Replication to Wide-Area Networks, Ph.D., 2008.

Nilo Rivera - Thesis: Seamless Connectivity and Mobility in Wireless Mesh Networks, Ph.D., 2008.

Ciprian Tutu - Thesis: Distributed Algorithms for Consistent Replicated State. Ph.D., 2004.

Claudiu Danilov - Thesis: Performance and Functionality in Overlay Networks, Ph.D., 2004.

Cristina Nita-Rotaru - Thesis: High Performance Secure Group Communication, Ph.D., 2003.

Jonathan Stanton - Thesis: Practical Wide-Area Group Communication, Ph.D., 2002.

R. Sean Borgstrom - Thesis: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Resource Allocation in Scalable Metacomputers, Ph.D., 2000.


Michael Kaplan - Study: Low-Overhead Routing for High-Performance Wireless Mesh Networks, M.Sc., 2006.

Ryan Caudy - Project: Scalable Process Group Membership for the Spread Toolkit, M.Sc., 2004.

Michael Hilsdale - Study: Toward a Practical and Seamless Wireless Backbone, M.Sc., 2004.

Ashima Munjal - Project: A Highly Available Message Queue, M.Sc., 2004.

John Schultz - Thesis: Partitionable Virtual Synchrony Using Extended Virtual Synchrony, M.Sc., 2001.

Jacob Green - Project: Hyperdog - Up to Date Web Monitoring Through Metacomputers, M.Sc., 2000.

David Shaw - Thesis: Walrus: A Low Latency, High Throughput Web Service Using Internet-wide Replication, M.Sc., 1998.

Additional students that conducted research

Theo Schlossnagle - practical distributed information infrastructure (1997-2001).

Alec Peterson - replicated Web service (1997-1998).

My own Ph.D. research

I was one of the initiators and main developers of the Transis project with Professor Danny Dolev at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
I was one of the main developers of the Totem group communication project with Professors Melliar-Smith and Moser at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

My Ph.D. presentation ( ps, ps.Z, ps.gz )

My Ph.D. Thesis: Replication Using Group Communication Over a Partitioned Network.

Last modified: January 2009.

:) Yair.