[Nets-seminars] faculty candidate talk: Iulian Moraru (CMU), Wed 2 Apr

[Brad Karp]

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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

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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. Iulianâ??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.
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