Robbert van Renesse

Robbert van Renesse is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He is a member of the Systems and Networking group. His research focuses on distributed systems, particularly fault tolerance and scalability. He co-authored Chain Replication and contributed to projects like Harmony (a model checker for concurrent systems) and EGOS (a minimalist operating system). He has held roles such as Chair of ACM SIGOPS and Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Computing Systems. His work spans academic contributions, industry collaborations (e.g., Exotanium, Inc.), and over 30 conference/workshop papers annually since the 1990s.

Education: M.Sc. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in Mathematics/Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under Andrew Tanenbaum. Professional experience includes roles at AT&T Bell Labs, Cornell since 1991, and co-founding companies like Reliable Network Solutions and D.A.G. Labs.

Research interests include blockchain technology (e.g., Bitcoin-NG for scalability), consensus protocols (BFT and Turtle consensus), and system frameworks like Ovid and Escher. His publications emphasize distributed algorithms, replication, and security. He advises over 30 Ph.D. students and co-founded Exotanium, Inc. in 2018.

Notable contributions: Chain Replication (OSDI 2004), Horus toolkit (commercialized as Sphinx), and foundational work in Amoeba OS. His recent work explores metastable failures and programmable memory segments.