While at Stanford, he participated in the design and implementation of the V distributed operating system. Currently, he is investigating the extent to which a network of workstations can be used to construct a loosely coupled multicomputer. TreadMarks uses several novel techniques resulting in much better performance than previous distributed shared-memory systems. The system has been distributed to a number of universities and industrial sites.
Rollback recovery is used to transparently provide fault tolerance for multicomputer computations.
Together, Zwaenepoel, M. Elnozahy, and D. Johnson have developed new algorithms for checkpointing, logging, and recovery. Manetho, a rollback recovery system based on these algorithms, has shown that rollback recovery extracts only a modest failure-free execution time overhead in return for the ability to recover from arbitrary failures.