My research interests are in the area of Computer Systems. Generally speaking, I am interested in Parallel and Distributed Systems, Middleware and Database Systems, and Transaction Processing and Database Recovery.

My supervisor is prof. Cristiana Amza. My research is in the area of Distributed Systems and I belong to the unofficial Autonomic Computing research group led by my supervisor and a few other professors from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I am also part of the Chameleon project, managed by my supervisor.

In my research work I am striving to provide scaling, fault-tolerance and automatic and transparent reconfiguration of the back-end database tier of dynamic content web sites. The types of applications we are considering include e-comerce (Amazon), online bidding systems (e-Bay) and bulletin board systems (Slashdot). We use replication as direct means to achieve these goals and we try to provide these desirable properties using clusters built out of cheap commodity machines. We use an optimistic replication approach, which is hybrid between lazy and eager replication. This approach, combined with certain properties of the classes of applications we target is able to provide close to linear scaling, serialisable execution and lightweight transparent failover in the case of single node failures.

Currently we are experimenting with databases whose working set fits entirely into the physical memory and combine approaches developed for main-memory databases and Distributed Virtual Memory systems in order to maintain the in-memory state reliable and consistent across nodes. In out work, we are using and extending the MySQL database server.