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Fault-tolerant computing was developed for mission critical systems like fly-by-wire aircraft and other closed and carefully engineered systems whose dominant source of failures was hardware defects. So-called "independent failure models" best characterized failures from such flaws that are likely to occur independently. But worms that prowl the Internet are not accidental, and are often launched against specific infrastructure components, such as a popular router brand, or Web servers running a popular operating system. When one target is hit, it is probable other like pieces of equipment will also fail. Professor Marzullo is developing new "dependent failure models" that better characterize this threat environment and he is designing optimal protocols for such systems. He has also worked on the theory and practice of epidemiological protocols, work that is based on mathematical models of the spread of disease to provide robust Internet-data dissemination. His research extends to computer grids, or networks that include large numbers of widely dispersed and heterogeneous computers to solve scientific problems such as large-scale simulations. Here he is defining strategies for guaranteeing reliability with small computational redundancy. He is also researching mobile agents, or software programs that move about networks, track their own progress, and retire themselves at task completion.

Capsule Bio:

Keith Marzullo joined the UCSD Jacobs School faculty in 1993, and he is a past chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In Sept 2010, he began serving as Director of Computer and Network Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia. At UCSD, he runs the Distributed Systems Laboratory and is co-PI of the RAMP project (Reliable Adaptive Multi-Path Networks) with his Computer Science and Engineering colleagues Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker. He is co-PI on the GriPhyN Grid for Physics Networks. Before coming to UCSD, he was an associate professor at Cornell University and vice president at ISIS Distributed Systems, Inc., in Ithaca, N.Y. He is professor at large at Norway's University of Tromsø. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in electrical engineering in 1984.