Welcome

Hello - I am currently at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Before that I was a doctoral candidate in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne). I was a member of the Laboratory of Operating Systems (LabOS). My adviser is Professor Willy Zwaenepoel.

I am a systems researcher. I build stuff that works and research fundamental system problems. Rather than doing measurements and augmenting complexities, I focus on improving productivity. I solve some of the big problems that experimental systems will inevitably face in the future if we do not improve the way we build systems.

My general research area is experimental software systems including distributed computing, databases and operating systems. Most of my work focuses on database replication, dynamic content web servers and middleware technologies.

Application Materials

• CV [ PDF ]
  
• Research statement [ PDF ]
  
• Teaching statement [ PDF ]
  

Selected Publications

• Database Replication Using Generalized Snapshot Isolation.
  Sameh Elnikety, Fernando Pedone and Willy Zwaenepoel.
  SRDS 2005: 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, Orlando, FL, USA, October 2005.
  [ Paper | Slides ]


• Tashkent+: Memory-Aware Load Balancing and Update Filtering in Replicated Databases.
  Sameh Elnikety, Steven Dropsho and Willy Zwaenepoel.
  EuroSys 2007 , Lisbon, Portugal, March 2007.
  Best Paper Award
  [ Paper | Slides ]


• Everest: Scaling down Peak Loads through I/O Off-loading.
  Dushyanth Narayanan, Austin Donnelly, Eno Thereska, Sameh Elnikety, and Antony Rowstron.
  OSDI 2008, San Diego, CA, USA, December 2008.
  [ Paper ]

Recent Publications & Events

• Panel: Dependable Data Management in the Cloud.
  John Wilkes (Moderator), Gustavo Alonso, Sameh Elnikety, Guillaume Pierre, Paul Murray.
  Third Workshop on Dependable Distributed Data Management (WDDDM 2009), Nuremberg, Germany, March 2009.
  [ Slides ]


• Migrating Enterprise Storage to SSDs: Analysis of Tradeoffs.
  Dushyanth Narayanan, Eno Thereska, Austin Donnelly, Sameh Elnikety, and Antony Rowstron.
  EuroSys 2009 , Nuremberg, Germany, April 2009.
  Nominated to CACM (Communications of the ACM), and got slashdotted (cache).
  [Paper | Technical Report ]


• Predicting Replicated Database Scalability from Standalone Database Profiling.
  Sameh Elnikety, Steven Dropsho , Emmanuel Cecchet and Willy Zwaenepoel.
  EuroSys 2009 , Nuremberg, Germany, April 2009.
  [ Paper | Slides ]


• Everest: Scaling down Peak Loads through I/O Off-loading.
  Dushyanth Narayanan, Austin Donnelly, Eno Thereska, Sameh Elnikety, and Antony Rowstron.
  OSDI 2008, San Diego, CA, USA, December 2008.
  [ Paper ]


• Tashkent+: Memory-Aware Load Balancing and Update Filtering in Replicated Databases.
  Sameh Elnikety, Steven Dropsho and Willy Zwaenepoel.
  EuroSys 2007 , Lisbon, Portugal, March 2007.
  Best Paper Award
  [ Paper | Slides ]

Recent Submissions

• Naxos: Strong Consistency in Replicated Snaphshot-Isolated Databases.
  Konstantinos Krikellas, Sameh Elnikety, Zografoula Vagena and Orion Hodson.