Welcome to my homepage !

  • I received a first class Honours degree in Mathematics in 1980 from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne
  • Between 1980 and 1982 I worked as a Systems Analyst and Computer Programmer for the Sage Group. I wrote the initial versions of many of Sage's well known commercial programs including the first Sage Payroll, Time Recording and Job Costing packages.
  • I received a Ph.D. degree in Theoretical Physics in 1985 from the University of Durham for research work on Composite models of Weak Gauge Bosons.
  • For 2 years I worked as a Consultant for Mari Advanced Microelectronics Ltd. I was the Project Leader of the Esprit projects Delta-4 and Concordia and a member of Delta-4 Project Technical Design Board. Delta-4 and Concordia were projects concerned with the design and development of fault tolerant distributed computing systems.
  • I am currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing Science , University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Research fields

My research interests lie in the department's distributed systems and dependability research groups.

My main interests lie in the areas of:

Teaching

I currently teach courses

 

Published papers

Here are some past publications

    A Wide Area Network Emulator for Corba Applications, M. Alsaeed and N.A. Speirs, 10th IEEE International Symposium on Object/component/service-oriented Real-time distributed Computing (ISORC), Santorini Island, Greece, May 2007, pp.359-364.

    A WAN Emulator for Corba Applications, M. Alsaeed and N.A. Speirs, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Technical Report TR862, October 2004.

    A General Purpose fault injector for Corba Applications, M. Alsaeed and N.A. Speirs, Supplementary Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN2004), Florence, June 2004, pp.28-29.

    A Timeout-Based Message Ordering Protocol for a Lightweight, Software Implementation of TMR Systems, P.D. Ezhilchelvan, F.V. Brasileiro, and N.A. Speirs, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 15 (1), January 2004, pp.53-65.

    Enhancing Crash-tolerance into Byzantine-tolerance: a structured approach and the cost of enhancement, D. Mpoeleng, P.D. Ezhilchelvan and  Neil A. Speirs, to appear in Proc. of The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN2003), San Francisco, June 2003.

    Implementing a Name Service using Bloom Filters, M.C. Little, N.A. Speirs and S.K. Shrivastava, The Computer Journal, Vol. 45 No. 6, 2002.

    A Two Tier Approach To Building Dependable Middleware Services, P.D. Ezhilchelvan and N.A. Speirs, workshop on Dependable Middleware-Based Systems, Supplementary Proc. of The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN2002), Washington DC, June 2002, pp. G-49-G-54, June 2002.

    Comparing Fail-Silence Provided by Process Duplication versus Internal Error Detection for DHCP Server, D.T. Stott, N.A. Speirs, Z. Kalbarczyk, J. Scheid, J. Xu and R.K. Iyer, 15th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, San Francisco, April 2001.
    A UML Tool for an Automatic Generation of Simulation Programs, L.B. Arief and N.A. Speirs, ACM Proceedings of 2nd International Workshop on Software and Performance, Ottawa, Canada, September 2000, pp.71-76.
    Simulation of a Telecommunication System using SimML, N.A. Speirs and L.B. Arief, IEEE Proceedings of 33rd Annual Simulation Symposium, Washington DC, April 2000, pp.131-138.
    Fault Injection Based Assessment of Fail-Silence Provided by Process Duplication versus Internal Error Detection, D.T. Stott, N.A. Speirs, J. Xu, S. Bagchi, K. Whisnant, Z. Kalbarczyk and R.K. Iyer, CS-TR-694, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Technical Report, December 1999.
    Simulation Generation from UML Like Specifications, L.B. Arief and N.A. Speirs, IASTED International Conference on Applied Modelling and Simulation, Cairns, Australia, September 1999, pp.384-388.
    Automatic Generation of Distributed System Simulation from UML, L.B. Arief and N.A. Speirs, 13th European Simulation Conference, Volume 1, Warsaw, June 1999, pp.85-91.
    Specifying Distributed System Services, L.B. Arief, M.C. Little, S.K. Shrivastava, N.A. Speirs and S.M. Wheater, BT Technology Journal, Vol. 17 No 2, April 1999, pp.126-136.
    Efficient schemes for constructing fail-silent nodes in distributed systems, N.A. Speirs, S.K. Shrivastava, P D Ezhilchelvan, F. Brasileiro and S. Tao, UK Patent No. 2288045, 1997.
    Implementing Fail-Silent Nodes for Distributed Systems, F.V. Brasileiro, P.D. Ezhilchelvan, S.K. Shrivastava, N.A. Speirs and S. Tao, IEEE Transactions on Computers, 45 (11), November 1996, pp.1226-1238.
    TMR Processing without Explicit Clock Synchronisation, F.V. Brasileiro, P.D. Ezhilchelvan and N.A. Speirs, Proceedings 14th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, Bad Neuenahr, September 1995, pp.186-195.
    Towards an Integrated Approach to Fault Tolerance in Delta-4, P.A. Barrett and N.A. Speirs, IEE Distributed Systems Engineering, 1 (2), December 1993, pp.59-66.
    Principle Features of the Voltan Family of Reliable Node Architectures for Distributed Systems, S.K. Shrivastava, P.D. Ezhilchelvan, N.A. Speirs, S. Tao and A. Tully, IEEE Transactions on Computers (Special Issue on Fault Tolerant Computing), 41 (5), May 1992, pp.542-549.
    Fail Silent Hardware for Distributed Systems, S.K. Shrivastava, D.T. Seaton, N. Howard and N.A. Speirs, in Delta-4: A Generic Architecture for Dependable Distributed Computing, Editor D. Powell, Springer-Verlag, 1991.
    The Delta-4 Extra Performance Architecture (XPA), P.A. Barrett, P.G. Bond, A.M. Hilborne, L. Rodrigues, D.T. Seaton, N.A. Speirs and P. Verissimo, Digest of Papers, FTCS-20, Newcastle upon Tyne, June 1990, pp.481-488.
    Using Passive Replicates in Delta-4 to Provide Dependable Distributed Computing, N.A. Speirs and P.A. Barrett, Digest of Papers, FTCS-19, Chicago, June 1989, pp.184-190.