Dan R. K. Ports

32 Vassar St, room 32-G908
Cambridge, MA 02139

drkp@csail.mit.edu
http://drkp.net/
PGP key (fingerprint BF00 1851 91E2 BA1D 63FC 7919 019B 6A83 08C0 A859)

I am a graduate student at MIT who is shockingly incapable of keeping a web page up to date.

This semester, I'm teaching recitations for 6.033 ("Computer Systems Engineering" for the non-numerically-inclined).

Currently, I am a Ph.D. student in Prof. Barbara Liskov's Programming Methodology Group at MIT CSAIL, which, of course, does very little at all related to programming methodology. My most recent work has focused on providing high-performance storage with strong consistency guarantees. For example, TxCache is an application-level cache for web applications that guarantees transactional consistency and provides a simple programming model. Another product of this work is the implementation of true serializability via Serializable Snapshot Isolation which is scheduled to appear in PostgreSQL 9.1.

I spent parts of the past few years at VMware, where most of my work involved defending applications from compromised operating systems using the Overshadow system. I also developed new algorithms for resource management, notably CPU scheduling for shared-cache multicore processors.

Previously, I finished a M.Eng. (Feb. 2007) with Prof. David Karger, working on Arpeggio, a peer-to-peer indexing system based on the Chord distributed hash table. Before that, I was an undergrad, also at MIT, where I wound up with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics (2005).

Generally speaking, I'm interested in almost all issues related to distributed systems and operating system: how to construct scalable, fault-tolerant, secure systems. At some point a list of projects that I've worked on will appear here. In the meantime, please refer to my publications list below.

A list of my publications is available, either in shiny Web 2.0 form, or as a flat list.