Distributed & Fault-Tolerant Computing

Distributed and fault-tolerant computing is a critical area of research for IBM. Our researchers work at a number of locations around the world and are interested in a wide range of topics. These include: clusters, security, distributed middleware, languages for parallel and distributed computing, hardware and software fault-tolerance, ubiquitous computing, and distributed systems management. Our current focus is on addressing key challenges in autonomic and Grid computing, and on the enablement of on-demand services. These initiatives are aimed at transforming today’s businesses in major ways. Broadly, our goals are: creating greater flexibility by the integration of disparate business and IT processes; reducing costs and increasing responsiveness through automation of the linkages between IT and business processes; and, improving capital and asset utilization through virtualization of resources. Links to a few representative projects are listed below along with a sampling of different aspects of our activities in the larger research community.