Ramakrishna Kotla has won two Best Paper Awards in the past five months. His most recent award was presented at the top conference in operating systems, the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-2007). The paper—Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance co-authored with Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, Allen Clement, and Edmund Wong—introduces a protocol that uses speculation to reduce the cost and simplify the design of BFT state machine replication.

Kotla's other Best Paper award was for SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System, a possible solution for long-term data storage which protects it from hackers, human error, hardware and software failures, and environmental catastrophes.