Michael Kaminsky

Research

I am generally interested in computer science systems research. More specifically, I enjoy working on distributed systems, networking, operating systems and network/systems security. At the ISTC-CC, I am working on a handful of projects under the broad umbrella of Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN), including key-value storage, cross-data center consistency, and software building blocks for non-volatile RAM (e.g., PCM). Previous projects include Neighborhood-Aware Networking (NaN), CloudConnect, Reliable Email (Re:) and Data-Oriented Transfer (DOT). Most of my graduate work involved a secure, decentralized network filesystem called SFS.

My Ph.D. thesis involved two pieces of work. First, I worked on the problem of how to do user authentication in a global file system. See our SOSP paper for more details. Second, I worked on REX, a remote-execution extension to SFS which incorporates the flexible key management and security already available in the filesystem. This extension is integrated with the SFS agent architecture and the filesystem; we hope with REX+SFS to provide a complete distributed computing environment where moving between machines is transparent. See our USENIX paper for more details.

In summer 1998, I did some really interesting and fun work related to the Interactive Barney doll from Actimates—check out this page for more info.

Biography

Michael Kaminsky is a senior research scientist in Intel Labs and an adjunct faculty member of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is part of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing (ISTC-CC), based in Pittsburgh. Michael joined Intel in Summer 2004 after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT. He received a S.M. (Masters) from MIT in Spring 2000 and a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley in Spring 1998. Michael is generally interested in computer science systems research, including distributed systems, networking, operating systems and network/systems security. His recent research efforts have focused on energy-efficiency, low-power servers, key-value storage, cross-data center consistency, and software building blocks for non-volatile RAM (e.g., PCM).