Distinguished Lecture Series

Marc Shapiro

INRIA, Rocquencourt

20. Juni 2013, 16:15 Uhr

S2|02 Raum C110, Robert-Piloty-Gebäude, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt

“Extending the cloud all the way to your machine with Conflict-free Replicated Data Types”

Abstract:

Scaling distributed applications requires replicating shared data in many geographical locations. This raises the issue of maintaining consistency. Eventual Consistency (EC) techniques make it possible to update replicas independently and without synchronisation and converge them later. However, existing EC approaches are ad-hoc and error-prone.

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a novel and theoretically sound approach. Some simple sufficient conditions ensure that all replicas of a CRDT object converge to a correct state, without requiring synchronisation or rollback. CRDTs are safe by construction, and remain responsive, available and scalable despite high network latency, faults, or disconnection.

We also describe our Swiftcloud platform, designed to simplify the implementation of applications sharing objects at extreme scale, very close to clients at the network edge. Swiftcloud extends the CRDT guarantees (with transactional consistency, causal consistency, and session guarantees) without violating conflict-freedom all the way to the end-user's machine.

Bio:

Marc Shapiro is a researcher in distributed and concurrent systems at INRIA in Paris (France). His research topics include large-scale distributed computing systems, focusing on data replication and consistency, especially in the wide area and in disconnected operation.

After his PhD at LAAS (Toulouse), Marc Shapiro did his research at MIT (Cambridge, USA), CMIRH (Paris, France), INRIA (Rocquencourt, France), Cornell University (Ithaca, USA), Sun Microsystems (Chelmsford, USA), and Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK). He is currently a senior researcher for INRIA in the Regal group (INRIA-LIP6).

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