Dr. Ahamad's research interest focuses on the operating systems and middleware support that is essential for enabling emerging applications in wide-area distributed computing systems. Currently, he directs projects that focus on two specific problems in such environments: scalability and security. Scalable distributed services will be needed for supporting complex and information rich applications that will allow widely distributed users to interact with each other in real-time.

Dr. Ahamad's work is exploring implementations of distributed services that scale along many different dimensions. For example, by making aggressive use of caching and replication, a service can not only accommodate a larger number of clients having different needs but by developing flexible and adaptive consistency models and protocols for shared state, response time can be tailored based on available resources and application requirements. A distributed object caching framework that provides such resource usage vs. consistency tradeoffs has been integrated with the BBN QuO middleware.