Santosh Kumar Shrivastava

I received the BE and ME degrees in electronics from Pune University, India, 1963 and 1965 respectively. I worked in industry for several years before obtaining a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge (Churchill College) in 1975. After that I joined the Computing Laboratory of the University of Newcastle where my present position is Professor of Computing Science.

Research Work

My research interests are in the areas of computer networking, real-time systems, fault tolerant distributed computing and application of transaction and workflow technologies to e-commerce. I lead the Distributed Systems Research Group.. The emphasis of my work has been on the development of concepts, tools and techniques for constructing distributed fault-tolerant systems that make use of standard, commodity hardware and software components. My group is well known as the developers of an innovative distributed transaction system (called Arjuna) and OPENflow, a dependable workflow system for the Internet.

I have led and managed several European Union funded, multi-partner research projects, beginning with BROADCAST (1992) to a project on complex service provisioning C3DS, and most recently, TAPAS, that started in 2002. My group has collaborated and received funding from many industries, including Nortel Networks, British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, Marconi and IBM. In year 2000, our research group won the prestigious award for innovation in IT from the British Computer Society.

So far I have successfully supervised 16 PhD students (8 of whom are from abroad) 

Together with my colleagues I set up a company in 1998 in Newcastle to productise Arjuna transaction and workflow technologies. The company was bought by Bluestone Software, Inc., a leader in business-to-Web and wireless technologies, for over $13M. In 2001, Hewlett-Packard bought Bluestone for US$500M, and the original Arjuna comapny operated as HP-Arjuna Labs, a part of HP's middleware division. After merger between HP and Compaq that led to substantial reorganisation of HP, Arjuna became independent again. Now based within the University campus, Arjuna Technologies is a centre of excellence in transaction technologies and is focusing on building products to support reliable Web Services-based applications. I am back at the University, concentrating on academic research and teaching. Close industry-university collaboration is guaranteed, and research projects on E-commerce platform and services have been initiated.

Publications

Please see the publications list maintained at the Distributed Systems Research Group. Here is a selection.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Reliable computer systems: collected papers of the Newcastle Reliability Project.  (Editor),  Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 1985.
Advances in Distributed Systems, (S. Krakowiak, S K Shrivastava, Editors), LNCS No. 1752, ISBN: 3 540 67196X. 2000.

Selected  Journal Papers

[1]    A view of concurrent process synchronization.  The Computer Journal, 18,4, pp. 375-379, December 1975.
[2]    Systematic programming of scheduling algorithms.  Software - Practice and Experience, 6, pp. 357-370, September 1976.  
[3]    Structuring distributed systems for recoverability and crash resistance. IEEE Trans. on Software Eng., 7,4, pp. 436-447, July 1981.  (Reprinted in Reliable Distributed System Software, IEEE Press).
[4]    (with P.Ezhilchelvan, N.A. Speirs, S. Tao and A. Tully ), Principal features of the VOLTAN family of node architectures for distributed systems, IEEE Trans. on Computers, 41, 5, May 1992, pp. 542-549.
[5]     (with G.D. Parrington, S.M. Wheater and M. Little), “The design and implementation of Arjuna”, USENIX Computing Systems Journal, vol. 8 (3), pp. 255-308, Summer 1995.
[6]    (with F. Brasileiro, P D Ezhilchelvan, N. Speirs and S. Tao), “Implementing fail-silent nodes for distributed systems”, IEEE Trans. on Computers vol. 45, no. 11, November 1996, pp. 1226-1238.
[7]     (with J. A. Smith), "Performance of fault-tolerant data and compute intensive programs over a network of workstations", Theoretical Computer Science, 196 (1998), pp. 319-345.
 [8]     (with I. Houston, M. C. Little, I. Robinson, and S. M. Wheater), “The CORBA Activity Service Framework for Supporting Extended Transactions”, Software: Practice and Experience, 2003, 33:1-23
   
Selected Conference Papers

[1]    (with G. N. Dixon), Exploiting type inheritance facilities to implement recoverability in object based systems. Proc. of 6th Symp. on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems,  Williamsburg, pp. 107-114, march 1987.
[2]     (with P. Ezhilchelvan and A. Tully), Constructing replicated systems using processors with point to point communication links, Proc. of 16th Intl. Symp. on Computer Architecture, Jerusalem, June 1989, pp. 177-184.
[3]    (with M. Little), Replicated K-resilient objects in Arjuna, Proc. of IEEE Intl. Workshop on the management of Replicated Data, Houston, Nov. 1990, pp. 53-58.
[4]     (with S.J. Caughey, G.D. Parrington), "Shadows: a flexible run-time support system for objects in distributed systems", Proc. of IEEE IWOOOS'93, Ashville, North Carolina, pp. 73-81, Dec. 1993.
[5]    (with F. Ranno and S M Wheater), "A system for specifying and coordinating the execution of reliable distributed applications",  DAIS'97, IFIP WG 6.1 International Working conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, Sept 1997, Cottbus, (Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, eds: H. Konig, K. G. Geihs and T. Preuss, Chapman and Hall,  ISBN 0 412 82340 3, 1997, pp. 281-294).
[6]     “Inter-task co-ordination in long-lived distributed applications”, (Keynote talk), Proc. Of Symp. On Distributed Systems, DISC98, Andros, September 1998, LNCS. Vol. 1499.
[7]    (with G. Morgan), “Implementing Flexible Object Group Invocation in Networked Systems’, IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2000), June 2000, New York, pp. 439-448.
[8]    (with J. J. Halliday and S. M. Wheater), “Flexible Workflow Management in the OPENflow system”, Proc. of 5th IEEE/OMG International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC 2001), September 2001, Seattle, pp. 82-92.       
[9]        (with N. Cook and S.M. Wheater, "Distributed Object Middleware to Support Dependable Information Sharing between Organisations", Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Dependable Syst. and Networks (DSN-2002), Bethesda USA, June 2002.
[10]        (with M. C. Little), "An Examination of the Transition of the Arjuna Distributed Transaction Processing Software from Research to Products", Second USNIX Workshop on Industrial Experiences with Systems Software (WIESS '02), Boston, December 2002.
 
 

Teaching

I have taught Distributed Systems to our final year students for several years before handing over the baton to Paul Ezhilchelvan. I have also taught Computer Networks for a few years and have handed over the responsibility to Albert Koelmans who is in charge from the summer of 2001. I took over the teaching of Operating systems from Dick Snow from Sept 2000.
I look after the recently started MSc on System Design for Internet Applications, where I teach enterprise distributed computing among a few other things.