[Nets-seminars] informal practice talk for Josh Leners of UT/NYU, Wed 22 Oct, 2 PM

[Brad Karp]

Hi, everyone.

Josh Leners, who is Mike Walfish's PhD student, and visited us three years ago to give a practice talk for his SOSP 2011 talk.

Josh will be dropping by again this Wednesday, the 22nd of October, to give an informal practice talk for LADIS 2014. It's a short, workshop-length talk.

Please attend and help give Josh feedback! Announcement follows.

-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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Informal Practice Talk

Speaker: Josh Leners, UT Austin and NYU

Location and time: Wednesday, 22nd October, 2 PM, Foster Court 219

Title: Taming Uncertainty in Distributed Systems with Help from the Network

Abstract:

This talk presents Albatross, a new service for improving the
availability and reliability of distributed applications. Albatross
combines old techniques with new networking primitives (namely, software
defined networking) to quickly decide when processes are crashed or
partitioned, thereby enabling fast recovery.  Old techniques include the
idea that it can be better to force a problem than to live with
uncertainty.  However, the straight-forward application of this technique
to network problems would be insane, so Albatross leverages new network
primitives to force network problems on a per-process basis, thereby
limiting interference with working processes.  In a preliminary
evaluation, we show that Albatross has sub-second detection time for
common network failures, and that Albatross---like similar services---can
be used to simplify recovery logic.

Bio:

Josh Leners received his undergraduate degree from the University of
Chicago. He is a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Texas at Austin,
and is currently a visiting student at New York University. He is
thrilled to be giving another practice talk to the UCL network and
systems group, having benefited greatly from the last one. His research
interests are in networked and distributed systems.