• Abstract: This dissertation solves three key problems of practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance: Performance, Cost, and Isolation. First, Zyzzyva improves performance and reduces cost of BFT applications using speculation. Second, SafeStore provides long term data durability by isolating faults aggressively along multiple dimensions. Third, CBASE improves performance of BFT replicated application by exploiting application-level parallelism.
  
  
• Code: The code is freely available for all three systems (Zyzzyva, SafeStore, CBASE) under open source licensing. You can also find code for PBFT system (by Castro and Liskov) with couple of bugs fixed here.
  
  
• Honors: This dissertation led to 3 conference publications, 2 best paper awards (SOSP and USENIX), 1 invited Research highlights article in CACM (under review), 1 fast tracked paper to TOCS (under preparation), and 1 NSF grant.
  

Publications

• "xBFT: Byzantine Fault Tolerance with High Performance, Low Cost, and Aggressive Fault Isolation,"   Ramakrishna Kotla. Doctoral Dissertation, May, 2008. (pdf)
  
  
• "Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance"   Ramakrishna Kotla, Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, Allen Clement, and Edmund Wong . In Proceedings of 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2007), WA, 2007. Best Paper Award
            Paper(pdf)     Talk(pdf)     Extended report (pdf)     Source code
            To appear in CACM Magazine as an invited article under Research highlights section (currently under review). New
  
  
• "SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System"   Ramakrishna Kotla, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Mike Dahlin. In Proceedings of Usenix Annual Technical Conference (USENIX 2007), CA, 2007.   Best Paper Award
            Paper(pdf)     Extended Tech Report(pdf)     Talk(pdf)     Source code
  
  
• "High Throughput Byzantine Fault Tolerance,"   Ramakrishna Kotla and Mike Dahlin. In proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2004), DCC Symposium, Florence, Italy, June 2004.
            Paper(pdf)     Talk(ppt)     Source code
  
  
• "BFT: Time is now," NSF grant proposal (based on Zyzzyva and SafeStore) that was awarded research funding in 2007 (CSR-PDOS: #0720649).
  
  
• "Asymmetric State Machine Replication,"   Ramakrishna Kotla, Mike Dahlin, Selected poster at 1st Symposisum Networked System Design And Implementation (NSDI 2004). pdf
  
  
• "High Throughput Byzantine Fault Tolerant Services,"   Ramakrishna Kotla, Mike Dahlin, Poster at 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Oct 2003 (SOSP 2003) . pdf
  
  
• "High Throughput Byzantine Fault Tolerance,"   Ramakrishna Kotla, M ike Dahlin, University of Texas at Austin(UTCS-TR-03-58) Dec 2003. pdf
  
  
• "High Throughput Byzantine Fault Tolerant Architecture,"   Ramakrishna Kotla, Masters Thesis, University of Texas at Austin. ps