| Ken Birman | |
| Birth Place: | New York City, New York |
| Occupation: | N. Rama Rao Chair in Computer Science, College of Computing and Information Science, Cornell University |
| Alma Mater: | Columbia University University of California, Berkeley |
| Spouse: | Anne Neirynck |
Kenneth P. Birman (born November 18, 1955) is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He currently holds the N. Rama Rao Chair in Computer Science.
Birman received his B.S. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.[1]
Birman's research is mainly concerned with scalability of distributed systems, security technologies, and system management tools employed in cloud computing.
An ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow, Birman was Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems from 1993-1998. He is also the author of several books, most recently Reliable Distributed Computing: Technologies, Web Services, and Applications, published by Springer-Verlag in May 2007.
He is best known for developing the Isis Toolkit, which introduced the virtual synchrony execution model for multicast communication. Birman founded Isis Distributed Systems to commercialize this software, which was used by stock exchanges, for air traffic control, and in factory automation. The Isis software operated the New York and Swiss Stock Exchanges for more than a decade, and continues to be actively used in the French air traffic control system and the US Navy AEGIS warship.
The technology permits distributed 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's research group at Cornell has created a series of open-source systems. Most recent among these is Derecho, a C++ library that provides Paxos in a form particularly well suited to modern datacenter networks, which run at very high speeds and can have extremely low node-to-node latencies. In such systems, it is important to adopt a protocol design that streams data as asynchronously as possible, and Derecho is unusual among data replication options in this respect: it uses a new "receiver-driven opportunistic batching" approach, whereby senders rarely need to pause when streaming high volume data.
Other results of Birman's Cornell research effort include Bimodal Multicast, a probabilistically reliable broadcast protocol, which uses the gossip paradigm; and Astrolabe, a scalable tool for monitoring, data mining and managing large systems.
A complete list of Birman's publications can be found here.
Birman's group has built quite a bit of software that can be downloaded, free (notably his group's new Derecho platform). Derecho implements an optimal Paxos protocol, configurable to support the classical durable Paxos with persistent storage, as well as an atomic multicast conforming to the vertical Paxos specification but using virtual synchrony for membership management. Derecho automatically maps to RDMA hardware when possible, and is highly performant both on RDMA and over standard TCP.