I am a researcher at MSR Silicon Valley working on networked and distributed systems. Earlier, I graduated with a Ph.D from Cornell University, where I worked with Ken Birman on reliable communication within and between data centers.

Currently I am working on storage stacks based on Solid State Devices. I am also interested in networking research in the large (data centers, clouds) and in the small (cellphones, 3G networks).

Publications:   

• Griffin: Extending SSD Lifetimes with Disk-Based Write Caches. Gokul Soundararajan, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ted Wobber. To Appear In FAST 2010: 8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, San Jose, CA, February 2010.
• Where's that Phone?: Geolocating IP Addresses on 3G Networks. Mahesh Balakrishnan, Iqbal Mohomed, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian. In IMC 2009: Internet Measurement Conference, Chicago, IL, November 2009. [paper]
• Differential RAID: Rethinking RAID for SSD Reliability. Asim Kadav, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Dahlia Malkhi. In HotStorage 2009: 1st Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, Big Sky, MT, October 2009. (best paper) [paper]
• On the Treeness of Internet Latency and Bandwidth. Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Dahlia Malkhi, Fabian Kuhn, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Archit Gupta, Aditya Akella. In SIGMETRICS / Performance 2009: Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, Seattle, WA, June 2009.
• Smoke and Mirrors: Shadowing Files at Remote Locations without Performance Loss. Hakim Weatherspoon, Lakshmi Ganesh, Tudor Marian, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman. In FAST 2009: 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, San Francisco, CA, February 2009.
• Reliable Communication for Datacenters. Mahesh Balakrishnan. PhD Thesis at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, January 2009. [thesis]
• Dr. Multicast: Rx for Datacenter Communication Scalability. Ymir Vigfusson, Hussam Abu-Libdeh, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman, Yoav Tock. In HotNets VII: Seventh ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, Calgary, Canada, October 2008. [paper]
• Tempest: Soft State Replication in the Service Tier. Tudor Marian, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse. In DSN 2008: 38th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DCCS track), Anchorage, AK, June 2008. [paper]
• Maelstrom: Transparent Error Correction for Lambda Networks. Mahesh Balakrishnan, Tudor Marian, Ken Birman, Hakim Weatherspoon, Einar Vollset. In NSDI 2008: Fifth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, San Francisco, CA, April 2008. [paper] [slides]
• Reconstructing Approximate Tree Metrics. Ittai Abraham, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Fabian Kuhn, Dahlia Malkhi, Kunal Talwar, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian. In PODC 2007: 26th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Portland, OR, August 2007. [paper]
• Optimizing Power Consumption in Large Scale Storage Systems. Lakshmi Ganesh, Hakim Weatherspoon, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman. In HotOS XI: 11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, San Diego, CA, May 2007. [paper]
• Ricochet: Lateral Error Correction for Time-Critical Multicast. Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman, Amar Phanishayee, Stefan Pleisch. In NSDI 2007: Fourth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Cambridge, MA, April 2007. [paper] [slides]
• Scalable Multicast Platforms for a New Generation of Robust Distributed Applications. Ken Birman, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Danny Dolev, Tudor Marian, Krzysztof Ostrowski, Amar Phanishayee. In COMSWARE 2007: 2nd IEEE/Create-Net/ICST International Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware, Bangalore, India, January 2007.
• PLATO: Predictive Latency-Aware Total Ordering. Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman and Amar Phanishayee. In SRDS 2006: 25th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, Leeds, UK, October 2006. [paper] [slides]
• Reliable Multicast for Time-Critical Systems. Mahesh Balakrishnan and Ken Birman. In WASR 2006: 1st IEEE Workshop on Applied Software Reliability, Philadelphia, PA, June 2006. [paper] [slides]
• Mistral: Efficient Flooding in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. Stefan Pleisch, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman and Robbert van Renesse. In MobiHoc 2006: 7th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, Florence, Italy, May 2006. [paper]
• Slingshot: Time-Critical Multicast for Clustered Applications. Mahesh Balakrishnan, Stefan Pleisch and Ken Birman. In NCA 2005: 5th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, Boston, MA, July 2005. [paper] [slides]