Reliable Distributed Systems

KENNETH P. BIRMAN is an ACM Fellow and a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, where his research focuses on reliable, secure, and scalable distributed computing systems. His work has been applied to the NYSE, the Swiss Stock Exchange, the US Navy's AEGIS warship, and the French air-traffic control system.

Basic Distributed Computing Technologies.- Fundamentals.- Basic Communication Services.- High Assurance Communication.- Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Model.- Styles of Client/Server Computing.- CORBA: The Common Object Request Broker Architecture.- System Support for Fast Client/Server Communication.- Web Technologies.- The World Wide Web.- Major Web Technologies.- Web Services.- Related Internet Technologies.- Platform Technologies.- Reliable Distributed Computing.- How and Why Computer Systems Fail.- Overcoming Failures in a Distributed System.- Dynamic Membership.- Group Communication Systems.- Point to Point and Multi-group Considerations.- The Virtual Synchrony Execution Model.- Consistency in Distributed Systems.- Applications of Reliability Techniques.- Retrofitting Reliability into Complex Systems.- Software Architectures for Group Communication.- Related Technologies.- Security Options for Distributed Settings.- Clock Synchronization and Synchronous Systems.- Transactional Systems.- Peer-to-Peer Systems and Probabilistic Protocols.- Prospects for Building Highly Assured Web Services.- Other Distributed and Transactional Systems.