[Nets-seminars] SEMINAR TODAY: Iulian Moraru (CMU), 2 PM, MPEB 1.03

[Hothi, Lynette]

Dear All

A reminder that we have a faculty candidate giving a talk this afternoon at 14:00 in room 1.03 Malet Place Engineering Building, which is a lecture theatre on the first floor.  Iulian Moraru is being considered for a Lectureship in Computer Systems and Networking.  Further details of the talk below ...

Lynette

Lynette Hothi
Deputy Departmental Manager
UCL Department of Computer Science
Tel: 33676 | E-mail: lynette.hothi at ucl.ac.uk | Web: www.cs.ucl.ac.uk
Office: Malet Place Engineering Building, Room 5.23  


-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Karp [mailto:bnkarp at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Brad Karp
Sent: 31 March 2014 18:54
To: research at cs.ucl.ac.uk; nets; nets-seminars at cs.ucl.ac.uk
Cc: Brad Karp; l.hothi
Subject: faculty candidate talk: Iulian Moraru (CMU), Wed 2 Apr

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Greetings, everyone.

I'm pleased to announce the next in the series of talks given by candidates for a faculty position in the Systems and Networks Research Group. Iulian Moraru of Carnegie Mellon University will speak at 2 PM on Wednesday the 2nd of April in MPEB 1.03.

Iulian works at the boundary between theory (as an algorithm designer) and practice (as a builder of ambitious fault-tolerant systems that offer hard guarantees in functionality, while offering high performance).

His talk is particularly timely in light of the choice of this year's Turing Award winner. Iulian's advances on the problem of fault-tolerant agreement--a fundamental primitive that underlies nearly all modern distributed systems replicated for availability, including most "cloud computing" services--build on Lamport's famous Paxos algorithm.

All strongly encouraged to attend! Talk announcement follows below.

See you there,
- -Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

- ---

UCL CS Faculty Candidate Talk

Speaker:        Iulian Moraru (CMU SCS)
                http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~imoraru/

Time and place: 2 PM, Wed 2 Apr, MPEB 1.03

Title:          Achieving the Full Potential of State Machine Replication:
                High Throughput, Low Latency, Constant Availability

Abstract:

Redundancy through state replication is the primary mechanism for achieving fault tolerance in distributed systems. State machine replication (SMR) is used extensively both within datacenters, where machine failures are common and must be tolerated, and in the wide-area, to ensure that data is close to all the clients that access it, and to guard against data loss and service unavailability caused by datacenter outages.

Today, the SMR protocol of choice in systems where performance and availability are critical is Paxos. Paxos does not depend on external failure detectors or reconfiguration services to tolerate the failure of a minority of replicas, and therefore, in theory, systems using Paxos have high availability. However, because of the need to optimize for high performance, the elegance of the core protocol does not fully extend to practical implementations.

This work aims to plant practical SMR implementation aspects in a firm theoretical ground, and thus to enable SMR designs that achieve high throughput through near-perfect load balancing, near-optimal request processing latency (especially in the wide area), and high performance robustness when confronted with failures and slow replicas. The talk will focus on Egalitarian Paxos, a new variant of the Paxos protocol. In EPaxos, all replicas perform the same functions simultaneously to ensure load balancing, constant availability, and low commit latency. We will also show the benefits of in-depth exploration of other aspects of state machine replication--aspects heretofore belonging only to the realm of practical optimizations--such as time leases.

Bio:

Iulian Moraru is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Professor David Andersen. Iulian's research interests lie in the areas of distributed systems, operating systems, and practical data structures and algorithms. Before joining CMU, Iulian received a B.Eng. from Politehnica University of Bucharest.