Lisa made a great shirt for Brendan’s computer science paper.

The title of the paper is:

Remus: High Availability via Asynchronous Virtual Machine Replication

The title of the paper uses Remus, one of the twins who in mythology founded Rome, as an allegory.

The t-shirt is modelled after the statue of the she-wolf and the infant twins, Romulus and Remus.

So the Mac icons are the twin computers and the she-wolf is the Internet.

Here is the statue.

So you understand the context of the allegory here is an excerpt from the paper abstract:

We describe the construction of a general and transparent high availability service that allows existing, unmodified software to be protected from the failure of the physical machine on which it runs. Remus provides an extremely high degree of fault tolerance, to the point that a running system can transparently continue execution on an alternate physical host in the face of failure with only seconds of downtime, while completely preserving host state such as active network connections. Our approach encapsulates protected software in a virtual machine, asynchronously propagates changed state to a backup host at frequencies as high as forty times a second, and uses speculative execution to concurrently run the active VM slightly ahead of the replicated system state.

The paper won best paper at NSDI.

Now we just have to wait and see how the t-shirt conference goes.

I recounted a story about how Chuffy was trying to figure out what rubia meant on a New York pizzeria’s drink list.

There were plenty of good guesses and requests for the answer.

So, here it is:

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