Building Curve

Distributed Systems

While distributed computing has been around since the early days of the DARPA net, the scale and importance of today’s service infrastructure is unprecedented. 

At the same time, embedded systems —formerly stand-alone systems —are themselves becoming part of the global infrastructure.The rapid deployment of sensors, cell phones and tablets, and networked microcontrollers throughout all of our technology creates fantastic opportunities and tremendous challenges in this field.

Carnegie Mellon has a rich history in distributed systems, with early work in parallel and distributed computers, distributed file systems and cluster computing. This research was characterized by our empirical, application-driven approach: research addressed pressing application needs and developed prototypes that could be used and evaluated by users. This research style continues to drive today’s research. Our research agenda is driven by the critical role the distributed service infrastructure plays in today’s society. While high performance remains important, system properties such as high availability, security and privacy, and manageability have also arisen as first-order requirements. All of these challenges are major research areas at Carnegie Mellon, where we focus on four research categories: data centers, information retrieval, peer-to-peer systems, and foundations.

Faculty Working in this Area

Last First Professional Title Available To Advise?
Amvrosiadis George Associate Research Professor, Affiliated Faculty
Andersen David Professor
Faloutsos Christos Fredkin University Professor of Computer Science
Ganger Gregory Professor, Affiliated Faculty
Gibson Garth Consulting Professor
Goldstein Seth Associate Professor
Harchol-Balter Mor Dr. Bruce J. Nelson Professor of Computer Science
Kumar Swarun Associate Professor, Affiliated Faculty
Parno Bryan Professor
Pavlo Andrew Associate Professor
Satyanarayanan Mahadev Jaime Carbonell University Professor of Computer Science
Seshan Srinivasan Joseph Traub Professor of Computer Science; Department Head, Computer Science Department
Steenkiste Peter Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering
Vinayak Rashmi Korlakai Associate Professor
Wing Jeannette Adjunct Faculty
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