M. Satyanarayanan

Who is M. Satyanarayanan?

Mahadev Satyanarayanan is an experimental computer scientist who has pioneered research in mobile and pervasive computing. One outcome is the Coda file system, which supports mobility in low-bandwidth and intermittent wireless networks through disconnected and bandwidth-adaptive operation.

Key ideas from Coda have been incorporated by Microsoft into the IntelliMirror component of Windows 2000 and the Cached Exchange Mode of Outlook 2003. Another outcome is Odyssey, a set of open-source operating system extensions that enable mobile applications to adapt to variation in critical resources such as network bandwidth and energy. Coda and Odyssey are building blocks in Project Aura, a research initiative at Carnegie Mellon to explore distraction-free ubiquitous computing.

His most recent work involves Internet Suspend/Resume, a hands-free approach to mobile computing that layers virtual machine state on a distributed file system. Early in his career, he was a principal architect and implementor of the Andrew File System. AFS was commercialized by IBM, is in widespread use today as OpenAFS, and has heavily influenced the Network File System v4 network file system protocol standard.